I find Macs incredibly annoying for lacking a taskbar. It takes forever to get to an open window if you have more than 3 programs running at the same time.
I love a PC for that alone.
You need to use Exposé. It's much faster at finding what you want than the taskbar, especially if you have a bunch of windows open.
Umm you can set the corners in OSX to act in that way. Go to a corner and every window on your desktop is scaled down and put next to each other, click on the one you want and it gains focus and its previous size and position. Your lack of knowledge is not Apples lack of ability..
RW, haven't we gone around the barn on this before? Aren't you still using OS9 at work? Maybe that was another freeper.
In any case, OSX has the Dock... which shows every open application... and Command-Tab will bring up a taskbar with all tasks which you can tab through... Since OSX Panther it has Expose' which is far better than any task bar. F9 displays all windows currently active in thumbnails and allows you to click on your choice to change focus and bring it to the front. F10 does the same thing for all open windows in the currently focussed application. F11 Clears all programs from the screen to reveal the desktop to access Finder.
OS9 had the Task Menu item on the menu bar at the right that allowed changing focus to all running apps... or hiding specific tasks. All very quick and very intuitive. Since I use all three platforms, I can tell you that the Apple method is far easier to find a specific windows than is the Windows approach.
As for speed of opening windows, I have 15 applications running right now... new windows open instantaneously.
Might I suggest that your Macintosh experience is extremely dated?
Mac OSX not only has a toolbar to solve that problem (and you can get third party software that emulates the old application selector menu, too, from OS9), but you can hit a function key which activates a feature called Expose which spreads all the open windows out on the screen so they appear side by side and you can select one. To me, that blows away anything that Windows or any earlier version of OSX could do.