Back to the question of who's copying who; could it possibly be that both companies are reacting to the will of the customers and Apple is simply faster/better at creating solutions? I mean, the whole reason there is a google desktop search is because people were sitting online googling content online and thinking "Why is it I can search trillions of documents on millions of computers all over the world faster than I can search a hundred thousand documents on one computer? I wish I could google my own computer."
Plus, it isn't like search just magically appeared with Mac OS X 10.4. There has always been a search function on Mac OS X. Its just now we have a search function that's robust and more useful. Besides, isn't Spotlight based on MySQLite? Wouldn't that be Apple's inspiration?
Jobs: Why can't we use MySQL to database and index our files so we can easily find them?
Engineer: We could.
Jobs: They why aren't we?
Engineer: *Poofs to work on Spotlight.*
Fast User Switching? Again, there has been user switching. Microsoft just happened to be the first one to implement it this time and even if Microsoft never thought of it, Apple would have had it anyways since it was a feature that was requested. Sort of like tabbed browsing. When Safari came out, it didn't have tabbed browsing but Mozilla browsers did. Did Safari copy tabs off Mozilla simply because they had them? No. They implemented tabbed browsing because users flooded Apple with feature requests that asked for tabbed browsing.
Yes, Apple does lift features off of Microsoft and we will probably begin seeing more lifting pretty soon with the influx of Windows users migrating to Macs who will be requesting features they had on Windows. Microsoft will copy many more features off of Apple simply because Apple is quicker and innovating and implementing which means that if Apple and Microsoft started working on the same project on the same day at the same time, Apple, chances are, would be the first to market. Its sort of like racing. They all start at the same place and they end at the same place and everybody cheers for the person they like and you enjoy rubbing it in when your guy wins. Except in racing, when your guy finishes first, you don't say the loser copied him but simply that he lost.
So, in the end, maybe Steve Jobs shouldn't have said "Redmond, start your copiers." Maybe he should have said it how it was and used the slogan, "Once gain we beat you to market, Microsoft, because we're the BMW of computers, a high performance luxury vehicle that is a feat of engineering marvel whereas Windows is a shoddily built and underpowered Hyundai, which may do the same thing as a BMW, but not with the same performance or style." But then again, "Redmond, start your copiers" fits better on a banner.