Expose: It really is that good and fast when you have multiple things open. An option for activating it will spread out all of the documents for just the current application. Another one does the equivalent of Windows-D.
Virtual Workspace - Definitely not new. But this is the best way of managing them I've ever seen. You even can do Expose with your workspaces, helpful for those “which freaking desktop did I put that app in” moments.
Back to my Mac, Screen sharing: Yeah, those are really need-based ones.
Time machine: Still don't have to care, spend only a second setting up backups ("Yes, I want to use this drive for Time Machine" when you plug one in) and then forget about them. Unless you need a restore, the issue will only come up again when you fill your backup drive, and clicking to allow it to drop off older backups takes care of that. That's the beauty of Time Machine -- backups that people will actually make.
ISO burning: Not exciting, but still a useful item.
Stickie Notes: Funny, I actually never use this one.
Podcast capture: This one either.
Software repositories: agree.
Desktop Cube: Definitely agree.
Application Dock: It's really a combination of quick launch, the task bar and putting in a few toolbars. And yes it has sexier, and live icons (video still runs, progress of apps shows in the icons). Little things like actually showing today's date on the Calendar icon lets me know someone was paying attention to detail.
Automated screen shots: Paint's fine for what it's for. But Windows adds unnecessary steps to taking screenshots. To get the full ability of OS X screenshots you have to install a third-party app.
Multitouch trackpad gestures: It is implemented better, more natural.
Cover flow: Cover Flow rocks! It's not just graphics, it's seeing your documents fly by. Looking for an image and tiny thumbnails aren't doing it? Flip through them in Cover Flow. Hitting the space bar shows whatever document you have selected in a larger window -- if it's a multi-page document you can flip through pages, if it's a movie you can play it (even make it go full screen), etc. Actually playing a movie in the QuickTime application is now unnecessary.
Pre-installed web server: I don't get that one either, unless you're talking about Vista Home, which doesn't come with it.
POSIX compliance: This is cool in that a lot of high-speed stuff (not just crapware) is out there free for UNIX, and thus now Mac.
Standardized menu ribbon: True, it's the applications. This is where Apple's momentum helps, since it's been hammering on developers about such standards from the beginning. Not mentioned, the menu bar always being at the top is a big advantage.
Single file apps: Yep, it is good. Unfortunately not all installs are drag-and-drop on the Mac.
I know my reaction to Expose and Virtual Workspace is entirely because of how I’ve trained myself to use computers in the last {cough cough} years. At work I always have at least 6 and frequently quite a few more Windows open, but I always have my taskbar visible so they’re all easily accessible with no additional commands. And I got really good with alt-tab back in the 3.11 days, actually that’s when I taught myself to leave visible space for the desktop, if you’ll cast your mind to the ancient history 3.x minimized apps down to icons at the bottom of the screen, guess who could always see those icons. So for other people these could be cool features, there’s no chance I’d ever use them.
I wouldn’t use Time Machine, turn it off. I realized I wasn’t a backup guy when finally something bad did happen and when contemplating going for my backups I decided there’d been a lot of crap on the machine I didn’t actually care about so I decided to rebuild from scratch sans crap. I’m a pack rat at heart so system crashes are an opportunity to clean. I also learned how little of my “important” data was actually important. Again this very well might kick butt, but I’d never use it.
So Application Dock is a lot like Dashboard. Dashboard was a great application, way ahead of it’s time. Not only have Mac and Windows stolen ideas from it OS/2 Warp stole ideas from it, I think IBM even called their quick launch/applet thing Dashboard. Of course it’s no surprise, Quarterdeck are the guys that made Desqview, always ahead of their time and never able to capitalize on it. Then they got bought by Symantec and we all know what they do to good apps.
I don’t know I don’t see that much advantage to the Mac screen shot, OK it’s one keyboard combo to turn it into a file, which probably has some funky non-descriptive name so now you’ll have to get to your desktop and rename the file to something useful and you probably want it somewhere other than your desktop anyway, sure you have to open Paint and paste the image and save it manually, but then you can give a useful name and put it where you want. Seems to me like they’ve got about even levels of handy and nuisance it’s just different parts of the process are handy.
Curse Black & White for making “mouse gestures” a dirty word, it is actually a nifty idea.
Cover flow still doesn’t sound even slightly exciting. I never have that much trouble finding things.
Of course the punchline for any feature “wish list” for Windows is that the most common, and most true, complaint about the OS is that it’s bloated. It’s got TONS of features most folks never use and don’t know about. There’s probably only about 10% of the users that even use 50% of the tools Windows already comes with. So anybody that comes up with a list of features Windows needs really should come up with a list of features they can dump, I mean really dump, truly free up the disk space and end all downward compatibility. And they better not complain if MS does put those features in and the guys who’ve been making 3rd party apps to do those things in Windows go out of business.