"Betrayed is not too strong a word."
Who cares whether or not Windows 7 will resemble the Mac OS more?
If the changes are improvements, only idiots would complain just because they resemble Mac aspects. If the changes are detractions, users will rightfully complain about them.
Judge an OS on it's intrinsic value, not on it's resemblance to another platform.

Let's not forget that the Mac OS X Dock is a rip-off of the Windows 95 Taskbar. The Taskbar was the innovation introduced with Win95. The Dock iterated it design-wise, but hardly functionally.

The guy doing the demo in the vid got a fact wrong. Alt+Tab (a-k-a CoolSwitch), was introduced in Windows 3.xx, not Windows 95. I was using it in the early 90s.

Let's also not forget that the Mac itself is a rip-off of the Xerox Star, which both SteveJ and BillG saw. SteveJ was first to rip-off the Star, but that doesn't make him any more of an innovator than BillG, who was next to rip it off.

Both the original Mac and Windows implementations were basically unusable due to engineering limitations (memory limits and no internal expandability on the Mac, and overall hardware limitations on the PC).

We should be glad Jobs brought Apple back from a death watch, and reintroduced competition to the desktop. Nothing makes Microsoft work harder than a competitive threat. The inverse is also true.

Bottom line: It's all 1s and 0s in the end. I prefer Windows, because it's much more fun to build apps for (better tools), EVERYTHING runs on it, and it doesn't assume all I use is a mouse.

Now about that WIn7 Taskbar: I sure hope they finally realized that users also want to sort and reorder their Taskbar icons. If not, it's still lame.

By the time it will be released in its 1.0 form, Apple will have Snow Leopard released, fixed , and adding 2 years more of distance in features and innovation wrt Windows 7. It's the only way they can gain market. By having a better product. I don't believe Windows will lose significant market quote, but I truly hope so. We're still stuck workin' with XP, a 2003 product, that is light years behind what OS X can do (besides what does better, almost eveything).

This article and many of the comments miss the point. It makes no difference what something "looks like". Appearance is not the point. Like an attractive person lacking intelligence and personality, copycat appearance is nothing but a seduction that soon grows old.

The point is how well the relationship works, and the benefits that accrue to the user of a system. For computer systems, reliability and stability always come first. Productivity is the primary value of a computer system, and anything about it that negatively impacts productivity is a detriment. Focusing on appearance misses this point.

Apple has understood this far better than most technology companies. They aren't perfect by any stretch, but they are certainly the leader today. And Microsoft has a lot of ground to cover to catch up. They can catch up if they focus on the primary value of information systems by delivering productivity improvements in every area of their system, starting with how efficiently the system runs on typical hardware. Given what they talk about and seem to focus their efforts on changing, I doubt that Microsoft understands this, yet.