Re: If we can cut through the fanboy drivel from both sides briefly....
It's a difference in philosophy.
The philosophy of the enterprise space which was dominated by IBM for more than half a century was to have computers which people were essentially peripherals to, feeding information into the system so that a few at the top could dominate. Hitler even used IBM machines in his social engineering endeavour with the full knowledge of IBM.
Others in the early 1960s saw that computers should be personal tools. Douglas Englebart, inventor of the mouse, was one. This idea took hold in Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs and Apple came along and said we can make reasonably-priced machines to do this. With the engineering genius of Steve Wozniak, that was true.
Steve Jobs showed Bill Gates what they were doing and Gates was smart enough to get it. But then Microsoft fell in with IBM and the old world of computers directing work got into Microsoft’s DNA. Hence Windows now looks like a product that you use at work to do the bidding of your masters. Microsoft inherited that from IBM. IBM dominated at a time when computers could only be afforded by large companies. Microsoft inherited that market and philosophy from IBM.
That is why when you compare the way a person uses OS X to Windows, you will see the OS X user with lots of windows open on the screen, whereas the Windows user will have one window maximised to the size of the screen - you just work on one thing that your boss has told you to work on.
Apple still focuses on the user. That is why it is so popular. The old-school IBM and Microsoft people still resent that - their power has been broken by this “upstart”.
So that is the two computing philosophies that distinguish Microsoft/IBM from Apple.
Actually there is a third philosophy, which is even more scary. That which came out of John McCarthy, inventor of LISP. Like Doug Englebart, he worked at Stanford, but whereas Englebart saw computers as tools to augment human intelligence (much as a fork-lift truck augments physical strength), McCarthy saw computers as eventually replacing human intelligence. That became the basis of AI (and the theme of many science fiction films from 2001: A Space Odyssey onwards).