Wow. I don't think any of this would make me cry but aren't you a wee bit defensive?
Let's see. No one says you can't maximize a screen. Drag it to full screen.
You mean as in drag the window up to the left corner, then go down to the right corner and yank the resize handle until the window fills up the screen? Sure, but that's like 10 times more cumbersome than clicking a single button, or dragging the title bar to the top of the screen like in Windows 7.
Or should we have 4 buttons. Is maximize the Mac max or the Windows max? If it's added, it wouldn't hurt my feelings. You said you wanted maximize like Windows as opposed to the Mac version. So, your version of a dictatorship is different how?
Umm.... no, I said I want it next to the Mac version. If by Mac version you mean the weird "+" button that sometimes resizes the window to fit the contents, sometimes not. Then you can click the green button and I can click the new purple or blue one.
And a window (Mac, Windows or Linux) can take up the exact amount of space that a user wants. Just resize it. I do wish the Mac allowed resizing using any edge/corner of the window but I still prefer the Mac's maximize philosophy.
Well, my philosophy is that my clients pay me for actual creative work, not for moving and resizing windows all day, so I feel that changes to a workspace layout should be something that happens in an instant, preferably with a single click. Getting the exact layout you want is cumbersome on a Mac.
Actually a single menu bar is a better UI than a menu bar for each app. Talk about wasted space. Also, muscle memory. I know I can throw my mouse to the top of the screen and always hit the menu bar. I don't have to pay close attention to "which" menu bar I'm choosing (oops clicked the wrong app because I don't have everything maximized and can see multiple apps at once

).
Well, it goes both ways. My muscle memory is programmed to aim for the upper left corner of the window I'm working in, I don't see how you could accidentally end up trying to click the menu of a completely different window. That's much more likely to happen on a Mac, since the menu bar is context sensitive. One accidental click along the way and the menu bar you were heading for suddenly belongs to Finder, not the app you were working in.
Just looking at it logically without any bias toward one platform or the other, I feel that there's something fundamentally wrong about one part of the application being entirely separated from its actual window. If you have two 30" screens and you have some tiny instant messaging application window down in the right corner of the right screen, does it really make sense to you that any part of that application's UI is up in the left corner of the left screen? Try to think past your muscle memory now - does it make
sense?
The Mac's menu bar was conceived in an age when dual or quad-screen setups were a distant pipe dream, when Macs had 9" screens and every pixel mattered. I had a similar menu bar on my Atari ST (=Mac ripoff) back in 1990 and it made perfect sense on my b/w 12" screen. But it makes zero sense today.
Actually Windows doesn't put the menu bar and the windows title bar in the same space. There's the title bar, the control box and the min/max buttons. Below that is the menu bar. Below that is the Ribbon (if using Office).
Well, it's not so much a question of where Windows puts things, the application developers decide where things go (within reasonable adherence to the UI guidelines, of course). IE has no menu by default... neither does WMP... or Safari 4... Adobe CS4 puts the menu on the title bar... but wherever it ends up, it's within the rectangular area where the rest of the app is, not on another planet at the top of the screen.