The graphical user interface still looks gorgeous! And it brings me a slight shudder that the look and feel might be more consistent that what we have today, even on the Mac.
Right until you open the AppleCD Audio Player… Music apps never followed the UI guidelines. :(
QuickTime looks felt bizarre even to us Windows users. Even though we had no expectations of consistent or pretty UIs, every time I had to use QuickTime (a typical use case: watching movie trailers) I marveled at the grotesque bizarreness of its UI.
Modern windows has no expectations of consistency, but Windows in the 9x era would have a pretty consistent feel. Sure, there were two file pickers, and yes some people made their own, but other than media players and games meant for full screen, almost everything used system widgets and kept system colors etc.
You're right, I misspoke. I meant indeed that media players had quirky UIs in general... I was thinking of WinAMP for example. But even then, QuickTime looks felt both bizarre and unwieldy to me.
The unique Apple CD Audio Player application pre-dated Mac OS 8 by quite a few years. It may have been one of the first widespread Apple experimentations with a colorful and somewhat different interface than original Mac updated only slightly for System 7.