Ugh Longhorn, i have seen it in action, and all i can say is yuck! 10.4 is by far superior.
Who ever said that OS X costs £100+ is speaking pure shit. it is £89. Yes its over $100.
The 2% market share, I think you'll find is rising. With you all mostly being "Windoze" users i wouldn't expect you to have heard of this, but the iPod which is the most successful MP3 player in the World, is showing people just how good the quality of Apples hardware is, so some of them are starting to use Mac instead. Plus you got to bear in mind a hell of a lot of PC's do not have there own users, as they are shoved in all kinds of places to the basic tasks. (i have seen them in super markets to control the till) but mostly you'll find them in offices, because they are cheap and cheap to replace if something goes wrong with them.
Stability, I have had OS X since it came out, and i have only had 1 major crash that happened for no reason, and 3 which were caused by bugs in my programs i was developing, where as when i used Windows XP, it crashed 5 times in 1 hour, while trying to do a CPU intensive task. Hmm really stable. And before you say anything i do a lot of CPU instensive stuff on my Mac, Compiling, Movie Editing, Graphics Design, etc
Networking, now that depends on what your doing, on windows it took me 1 and a half to set up a wireless router for my friend, i'll admit not that bad. On my Mac, all i did was plug in the wireless card, boot my laptop, and the system recognized it, found the network, configured the card and connected it for me. Yea thats really difficult to do, oh my god the effort! Even when setting up a Ethernet based network, yea you need to fill out a few settings to configure it completly, but not loads around 3 fields of information.
A new program in Tiger, called Automater allows regular home users to create simple programs with no code to automate really repetitive tasks. I'm not seeing anything like that on Windows or even planned. You can garuntee if M$ copy it, it will be a botched up job.
Core Data, makes life easier for developers as it lets you visually see your applications Data Model and create it with no code! I'm not even going to go near windoze equivelents.
Windoze also has a big problem with incositency. I have been working in 2 programs recently on windoze while doing some college work, in both programs the Text Areas behaved differently, controls looked different, toolbars behaved differently. Whats up with that? Microsoft too lazy to program in some standard controls to the system so that the developers can use them and have a consitent look?
That new authorisation (i think thats how you spell it) dialog in Longhorn, is prime example of the bad Windoze design. They don't even have the OK and Cancel buttons, instead they have a new control, Green arrow pointing to whitespace. WTF? Plus it does not explain why you are needing to type your password! It'll just popup when you least expect it.
The place where long horn is really innovating is user icons. You can now see your user icon nearly everywhere you go, even where it is not needed. OMG this is cool, i can have my screen space taken up by loads of icons. wow someone struck good at the M$.
The new window appearance, with the semi see through border. Hmm, doesn't windoze use an MDI? Won't that border be off the screen most of the time where you won't see it? That is another prime example of bad design on Microsofts part.
Now i'm not testing windoze longhorn (what the hell kinda crappy name is that anyway? Windows Users Long for Longhorn.
Or Redmond Start Your Copiers), nor would i even want to, but all my information is from reports and screen shots from M$. Now i know things may change in it as it goes through development.
The fact is Apple are the innovators. Apple were the first to suggest the idea of floppy drives inside a computer, when that happened everyone else where syaing you can't do that! After several years all computers had built in floppy drives. Apple was the first computer company to use something other than beige for computers, windows users all said that it looked hideous, now look, you hardly see beige computers anymore. The transparent plastic the iMac G3 used, is used in hundreds of products across the market. They dropped the floppy drive from computers, Windows users said how will people be able to live with out floppys? PC Vendors are now dropping internal floppy drives.
The fact that the Mac OS only runs on Macs may not be true for much longer, there is rumor that there is a version that can un on x86 machines.
Anyway, no matter how much you try and argue or pursuade a true Mac Fan to switch from Mac and downgrade to windoze, you'll never be able to do it.