I don't see any difference in the look of the OS between windows 95 up to ME. XP looked different but even then you could get the "old" look back if you wanted to.

Mac OS made slow but steady progress from 7.5.3 to 8, adding color and texture, support for 16 and 32 bit color, etc. OS 9 wasn't so much of a leap, but it did add sticky folders along the bottom, which was sort of a precursor to the dock. I had 9.2 on my blue and white g3 tower, and it ran like lightning. When I upgraded to OSX it was a whole other story. That thing was slow as molasses. Things are just now getting back up to the speeds they should have been at all along.

Ever since windows came out it's been buggy and crashy and unpleasant. I can't really blame it though, it was written to be able to use just about anything you plugged into it in some form or another.

My biggest observation about the 2 OS's is in the search command. Apple has always had a simple, intuitive search command that would just find the file you were looking for. Windows didn't, and AFAIK, still doesn't. If you rely on google desktop to search files on your computer, then that's as sure a sign as any that your OS sucks. Apple-F worked wonderfully, Sherlock was pretty good, and now spotlight is wonderful even if you don't have indexing turned on. I get tired of waiting for an hour in windows for it not to find my file, and I really want to shoot that damn dog in the face.