At least for me a big part of doing the mac thing was simply doing something different. Quite frankly I'm not seeing a big difference between platforms right now. Subtle OS differences mostly. Time will tell for sure, but I'm using OSX daily now, for better or worse.
Apple maintained some years back that, with the improvements in Windows that
working in one app was roughly equivalent on both platforms, but working with multiple apps was still superior on OSX. I don’t wish to start a flame war, but it will be interesting to get your opinion on this and general interface differences/commonalities after spending some time using OSX. Particularly interesting as you will be continuing to use Windows.
I really like OSX’s very sturdy
drag-and-drop for one thing (in some of my work, I use 3–4 apps concurrently and need to move data back and forward). I have read that the Windows clipboard is not as reliable, and found this to be so when I was teaching. I also use an app called
Jumpcut to allow for multiple clipboard items.
I used Windows when teaching multimedia at a technical college some years back—I couldn’t get the hang of it at first, and
felt very closed-in until I realised that every app ran in its own
window, quite different from the Mac approach of each app having the menu bar to itself when it is in the foreground, with all others waiting behind (or hidden) until needed. I suspect that a lot of Windows users trying a Mac may feel as if it’s
too wide open at first, accidentally clicking through to the desktop for instance (there are fixes for this, as there are for so many system features and settings).
Having said that, there of course are utilities available for
both platforms that allows customisation and addition of features; for instance, I use
Cinch, a Mac shareware app that emulates some Windows 7 window sizing features—I use it only in Safari and Finder though.
It’s great that we have competition and differentiation; if there was no Apple we might be using DOS 15! If we had no MS, Macs would be very expensive but very nice looking, and NextStep/OSX might never had happened.