They are in no way "displaced windows users"... We use Macs for anything and everything publishing related here... most of our calls come from the Adobe CS suite workflow... currently CS2, and rolling out CS3 soon. But these people have been using Macs for longer then all of you combined. They were using Macs back during the powerpc chips.
I will admit, most of the world does not look at any computing experience with a logical approach. But that doesn't make all windows users dumb. I can put a Mac in front of my parents just as easily as a PC and they would still have the same level of difficulty. There is a learning curve either way.
And what is wrong with the start bar? The macintosh has a dock that you use to launch applications... our start bar and menu just have more things in it. You also have a menu at the top which lists all the running applications... again, no different.
Playaa mentioned hitting f11 and bringing up the desk stop... windows key + D does the same thing.
I will say this though... Our mac support RARELY ever has to re-install OS X... I mean they have a hard time remembering when they have had to... where as, windows does need to be re-installed at times to solve things. OS X in that respect is more stable... but again, if there was as much of a software development following as there is on the PC, I would say the macintosh platform would have more issues.
so far, all arguments have been opinionated for the most part... no solid argument either way... which tells me the platforms are equally great serving two different flavors...