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You do not need to install iTerm and zsh; Terminal.app and bash will do the job just fine, alternate terminal and shell are just preferences.

cmd.exe and conhost.exe won't do the job.

Also zsh is pre-installed with the latest few versions of OS X anyway.

That's an interesting point.

Mabye Homebrew, and its predecessors, were the real killer apps for mac?

A good terminal and python are both standard with OSX. Though I agree having homebrew does make life easier. Don't think Windows has an equivalent...

Perhaps it was more the underlying compiler tool chain. With the compilers included in MacOS you can install nearly anything.

chocolatey

In addition to all the typical Bash tools, you also have C/C++/Objective-C, Apache, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, SQLite, and Apache.

Maybe I just don't remember installing it, but I think macs have zsh out-of-the-box too.

For PHP, MySQL and Apache on Windows I just unzip three different zip files and and then add some standard configuration. Done.