Ok, let's say OS X 10.0 vs. 10.1.
I think that in some ways, that's closer to Windows 95 to Windows 98 but, like I said, I admit that Apple released OSX before it was ready for primetime, which is why most OSX software won't run on anything below 10.1 or 10.2. It's no secret, even if Apple's marketing department doesn't advertize it. It's old news.
If there is a legitimate reason to wait, I wait. I waited for 10.1 because 10.0 clearly wasn't ready for primetime when I tried it on a dual-boot machine. I upgraded to 10.2 and 10.3 almost immediately because they offered me important improvements and gave me no reason to be concerned. I haven't upgraded to 10.4 yet because (A) it doesn't add any features that I'm dying to have and (B) I have some concerns about the security of some of the new features.
So, no, I don't personally give Apple a pass and trust them blindly. But what makes Mac users laugh at the claim that people need to wait for SP1 before upgrading to a Microsoft product is that they simply assume, sight-unseen, that a Microsoft product is going to have major security defects that won't be properly fixed until the first Service Pack is released. I'm not so worried about the security of OSX 10.4 that I wouldn't upgrade, nor do I expect major problems to be found. My decision is as much, if not moreso, because I don't expect to get anything I really need out of it.
While that was a free update, it was far more than a "service pack" level update.
OSX.0 was at best a "Beta" version... and the first really viable version was the OSX.1.
In OSX, because Apple wants to keep the double entendre "X", major upgrades are designated in the first decimal column while service pack upgrades are in the second decimal column... For example OSX.4.2, where the OS is X, the major revision is .4, and the service pack level is .2.