Having never even seen a mac until I was 18, I am definitely no Mac fanatic, and have pretty much used windows all my life. I switched a couple of years ago, and one of the first things that I really loved was the lack of maximize. With windows, you are expected to work in a maximize environment, and that is how programs are designed. This makes it terribly difficult to use 2 programs at once. For example, I often want to convert a tree diagram on the internet into an omnigraffle graph. On windows, I would be Alt-Tabbing all the time. On my mac, having the image on the side is natural, and makes things far easier.
Also, you realize that most documents are meant to be longer (height) than wide, and so maximize is useless, since the edges are really of no use at all. I will agree that there are times maximize could be useful, however, I still would not want Apple to adopt a maximize button because developers would start making apps assuming that people only want their application on the screen at any one time.
