Operating system discussions are like political or religious discussions, really everyone is right!

As far as I'm concerned, there is really no war between the OS's, every OS can run be made to run any application with technologies like virtualization, so it all boils down to the interface. There is a legal limitation of running OSX on non-Apple hardware, although you can go into any Apple store to try out the interface.

Do you like the Windows interface? If so, stick with it. I have all three Os's in production use.

I have to have a Windows machine to run some of our core applications, I like the human interface and quality of the display on Apple products and I have Linux machines for testing, handling large amounts of data/downloads and doing processing jobs. The best part of this setup is I can access any OS from any other OS as long as I have internet access. So I can be on a Mac running my Windows apps on a Windows machine and running some other processes on a Linux machine, these machines can be physical or virtual.

I think if you get used to things like mouse gestures and multi-touch, you will really have a hard time going back to traditional human interfaces. Now, by multi-touch and gestures, I'm not singling out OSX on Apple products, Linux (like Ubuntu Linux) has had support for multi-touch and gestures for years, even on hardware that under Windows does not support multi-touch.

In this war of the human-machine interfaces, Apple throws another curve ball, the iPad.

I know what most of you are thinking, it's like a very diluted Netbook, and then there are those who say it can't do half the stuff their laptop can do. And they are all correct! I think the iPad is really not a replacement for your laptop or netbook. It's a new way for humans to interact with machines.

Essentially, it's a device that will let you login to your Windows, Linux or OSX machines in an entirely new way, instead of the mouse and keyboard that are so dominant in the industry currently. Of course, I might be entirely wrong and the whole idea may just be a flop, time will tell and no I have not purchased the iPad personally... yet.