Pre-OS X was ALSO fine ... very fine
I have to disagree with you. Completely.
I was an early Apple/Mac evangelist, and set up many retail businesses with Macs and Fat Macs, using HyperCard and pfs:File and the like to handle their needs.
Mac didn't work in the embedded sector, though, and so I drifted away.
I came back in 1998 when, after getting sick of a series of crappy Wintel laptops from HP, Compaq, et al., a customer overseas loaned me a Wall Street. It ran System 8.5, and when I installed MS-Office I found that I was able to continue doing my documents and spreadsheets, and show my PowerPoints, with an easy interface to a video projector display, no hassle Ethernet networking (remember aftermarket Winstacks?) and non-stop operation when switching between two batteries - one in each bay.
I came back from that trip and told my PA, who was a Mac fanboy himself, to get me one before I had to go out on the road again the following week. I was hooked again, and didn't look back.
Before OS X came out, I also started using ClarisWorks (later, AppleWorks) and it did most of what I needed from MS-Office, but did it quicker, and more simply, than Microsoft's bloatware. I also never found myself in "Word hell" anymore, when you could make a change in a large, complex Word doc and suddenly find that something else 15 or 20 pages later would get messed up, usually the formatting....
The pre-OS X days were much better than the equivalent technology for Wintel back then, too.
