Woj, with all respect, I think you need to sit this one out. ;-) Any OS vendor who does not permit 3rd party software to run on their system is doomed. Arguably, developing for Mac OS X is easier than Windows (I have written a few applications myself on both platforms), and almost as easy as on other flavours of *nix. I say "almost as easy" because despite the awesomeness of Xcode and Cocoa the lack of high-level toolkits/APIs across programming languages (other than Objective-C and a couple of decent bridges for Python and Ruby) is an annoyance.
You are wrong about the iPhone as well. Though the App Store business is annoying as hell, as is their requirement that I fork up $99 to write apps for the iPhone (and I refuse to do that, though I sorely need to code up a one-click Bluetooth on/off app). But what in fact differentiates the iPhone, as validated in a recent poll on app usage on the iPhone vs other smartphone platforms like the G1, is the rich range of 3rd party apps available for it.
On another note: Like Fernando Cassia, I too favour an open source model/philosophy/nature of development and software use. But that's a different kind of argument, IMHO (as opposed to what helps and educates a non-techie user).
You guys throw around terms like "commodity fetishism" as if it explains everything. It does not in any way address the question of which OS is better (better as defined by any sensible criteria that we can agree on), especially for an end user.
Re: graphic design, I hope we are not going to trade anecdotes, because it will take me all of the rest of this year to list examples of the attitudes among my fellow software developers. Arguing that some graphic designers have bad attitude, or many Apple fanboys have bad attitude, etc, is no doubt cathartic, but really, can we get past that?
--ravi