EDIT: I just remembered a video I found a month ago with a mock-up of a "Windows 95 Mobile" OS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0DDQumaaCg The screens that look like they were mocked up specifically for the video (as opposed to the ones that are just screenshots of Windows 9x-era desktop applications) look like they would make for quite a nice UX.
Windows 95's taskbar was a godsend. It was IMO the first GUI approach to multitasking that worked, and on top of that you had Alt-Tab which was the icing on the cake. Mac OS tried to emulate that with Command-Tab, but it never worked as well as on Windows (IMO the only desktop to ever improve on Windows Alt-Tab was KDE, especially when they switched to vertical layout in 3.3 or so).
Now, if you started talking about merging the Win95 multitasking UI with the rest of the System 7 GUI and Mac OS 8's theme, you've got my ear.
(Also the UI elements are way too small to actually use on a touch screen without a stylus. But I wish we could get them back on our non-touchscreen PCs.)
As a teen I despised this gui paradigm, I found it too limited, I actually wanted something like a smalltalk image or an html/js thing where you could extend all the things at will. But with age, I learned that it's rarely necessary.