Very little in 2019. While back in the day, PC builders were content with boring and uninspired designs, that has all changed. You will frequently see PC makers that use superior parts, superior designs and in some cases superior quality then Apple.
Interesting perspective. Unfortunately I can't agree at all. I remember when I bought my Surface Book 2 (15") and started advocating people here on how awesome it is. But as many people, I did the mistake of judging a book by it's cover.
Once I started using the Surface Book productively, it started to fall apart on each front. Either it was issues with Windows itself, like the UI constantly lagging, or hardware related:
1) The paint job or whatever it is, it's done poorly. It rubbed off on my first flight, leaving behind ugly marks. Once I sold it later on, nobody trusted me and I had to sell it for roughly half of the price (after 6 months!). By comparison: I had my 15" MBP for one year and sold it with 400 loss. My 6 year old 13" MBP still looks as new on the outside, even though I treated it like ****!
2) Constant overheating of the components. Sometimes it was impossible to use the tablet because it was so hot.
3) The hinge is a cute idea, but it's not a great user experience. The force threshhold is too high to be comfortable, yet too low to stay in place.
4) The hardware was hardly balanced, with the CPU throttling the GPU.
5) The operating system didn't support most of the capabilities of the device like on the Mac. It's up to the individual software developers to integrate hardware features. I'd say this is the biggest advantage of Apple: Innovations end up being used instead of becoming vaporware.
This is only one example. I chose this device because I wanted to have an equivalent to a Mac in the Windows world, that capitalised on its biggest advantage: Touch Screens. But it still sucked, I prefer a dedicated experience like the one on the iPad any day. Nobody really optimises for the Windows tablet experience. It's just a bad compromise.
As for other vendors, I tried a lot of them in local stores, but the experience was even worse: The touchpads were horrendous, the touchscreens cumbersome, build quality seemed even cheaper and there are no official shops to turn to in case of issues. At least in Microsofts case you get the potential of a store opening up in your hometown.
Yes, the competition is full of innovations. But none of these innovation matters, if the experience of using them just sucks. Even the touchbar is more useful than any of the stuff you'll find on Windows laptops. I bet Apple came up with most of the stuff you see in Windows laptops nowadays just as well, but ended up killing the idea when it just didn't work well enough.
And that's another difference I think: Where other vendors couldn't afford to throw all of these R&D efforts away, Apple will just cover it with their profit margin (Microsoft does the same, which is another reason why I gave them a shot).
