Certainly they ramped sooner, but we're catching up. It seems that a lot of people are proud of the fact that they have taken Linux and made it look like Windows. You're looking at the wrong user interface. KDE is a great example of making Linux look like Windows. Youshould look at some of the stuff that's starting to come out of the Enlightenment project.
User interfaces are old.
We knew how to do them at Apple. It isn't going to change. But then he sat down with Mandrake, and Mandrake started showing some of the things Enlightenment could do. They've created this really fast, lean window manager that lets people create these sort of arbitrary back-decorations on windows. For example, you can have a completely transparent background, with floating text hanging anywhere in the middle of the screen.