I would like to remind people that even a design focused company like Apple do softwares with crappy user experience (think iTunes).
User experience is hard to get right and what you would consider a good user experience might not be a good one for your neighbour: some prefer clicking on buttons, some prefer clutter-free UIs with keyboard shortcuts.
1. Any company that produces bad UI should be called on it, particularly when that UI is going to impact such a large number of people.
2. I have a sense that it's not just anti-MS griping because, after all this time, after seeing the ascendency of design centric products, we find MS is still incapable, on an institutional and management level, of improving. Indeed they are getting worse at this.
3. If MS had produced something truly impressive, I think you'd see some honest, if not muted, clapping from even the anti-MS crowd. I'm no fan of MS (or Apple in many ways), but I'm a fan of trying hard and doing good work. This seems like neither.
P.S. You are right to point out Apple's failures. iTunes is a beachhead product that they are terrified of abandoning or altering lest it kill the golden goose ecosystem (they have no qualms about killing the golden goose of other people's ecosystems, cf the pro apps series, in the name of usability, though I think their success record there is spotty at best). It is an experience nightmare as well. I also hate the direction of the faux-natural-ui garbage in iCal and elsewhere in the system. Apple isn't hitting all homeruns on the UI front, even if they have raised the bar.
edit: spelling, more words.
This is the real lesson from Apple. It's not just that there has been a top down design martinet running the show (that's obviously key); it's that there is a real ethos of design and perfectionism (at least in terms of UI/UX) that not only functions as a guide internally, but which is so strong and clear and implicit in the apple ecosystem that the developers of apple apps have internalized it successfully. It's not just the apple HID guidelines; it's much, much deeper than that.
I absolutely loathe the centralization and control Apple imposes on content. I am in fact a rabid Linux user. But this lesson from Apple can't be ignored.
Metro is one silo in Microsoft learning the UI/Design lesson. What they need is a design ethos, and that is much more difficult. It requires leadership, time and most of all consistency. The latter factor is almost the antonym of Microsoft.
Apple devs definitely follow the design principles espoused by apple, but the problem is the design is starting to go bad. Apple has confused pretty and faux-real with good design.
The desktop experience needs to be shaken up and I'm glad it's happening, but I don't like what's being produced by either iOS/Lion or Win 8.
I did hear they resolved it in a later release of 10.4, but I was pretty annoyed.
Apple does tend to fix bad uses cases like these much quicker, as they have limited configurations of OS deployments to address... this is by design also.
Other than that it rocks (literally)