re: If you were starting over

Whether you like the UI or not, Windows 8 is a better OS at its core than OS X is. The fact is that Windows 8 is superior to OS X in terms of performance. Yeah, the Charms bar and lack of a start menu was a major faceplant. It's easy to say "Oh, but everyone hates the UI!" and forget that that's easily modified. A gap in performance isn't something that you can really "fix".

Don't get me wrong. OS X has a beautiful UI. I also enjoy the plus of it being a UNIX-based OS. Aside from that, OS X is nothing to write home about. It's pretty sad when performance tests to compare to two are performed on Apple hardware using Bootcamp, which throttles by performance up to 20% for a Windows OS, just to make it seem competitive.