I've been a Mac user since 2004 but a couple of weeks ago I bought a Surface Pro 4. It's not my main computer but I use it for work a few hours daily. Things I miss most from my Mac are:
- The Finder. The file manager in Windows is horrible. There are no tags and no tabbed windows. There are lots of options I don't care about and almost none of them actually help me managing the files. I used to bash Finder but now I love it.
- Small utility apps like DefaultFolderX, which is a must have for me.
- I miss the polished apps available for macOS. Windows has a thing called Modern Apps but I found that most developers don't care about updating their apps for this new look & feel. So unless you're lucky enough to find the modern apps you can use, you're stuck with the ugly XP-style apps.
- There are tons of software available for Windows but there are no modern email client apps like Spark or Airmail on the Mac. I use the default email app from Windows 10, it's lightweight but it works well.
Despite all of this I like Windows 10. I had no troubles with it. If you don't install garbage on it, it works as well as macOS.
I largely agree with Beavix. Windows' finder isn't exactly a work of art. It offers a ton of features, but it's just not very pretty. I personally have never used tabbed windows on Mac OS, but Finder is way more visually pleasing and less finicky to use than explorer. The problem is that every time Microsoft tries to change something with the explorer, a huge s*** storm ensues as apparently, Windows users are as change resistant as Mac users
Didn't know DefaultFolder X - looks great but I'm weary about giving smaller devs full control over the file system. Certainly looks useful, though.
As for polished apps: really depends on the devs. I think most modern mainstream apps look and perform great on Windows, but there's a huge amount of legacy crap that looks terrible and doesn't work well. I usually have to evaluate 2-3 apps for each problem until I find one that looks good and is well-maintained. I think this probably has to do with the huge number of devs, many of which just "fire and forget" software and leave it lying around for years. The stuff you get from the Market is usually alright, though, but that one, much like Apple's App Store, mainly includes smaller stuff and games.
The E-Mail Situation is somewhat dire on Windows. The built-in client works well but lacks features, such as aliases. Then there's Outlook, which is overkill for all except the most demanding enterprise users. And there's really not much in between. Spark and Airmail, while pretty, are not the best examples, though, as both of them store your e-mail credentials somewhere on rented servers with god knows who having access to them, so that has never been an option for me anyway. Apple Mail is fairly decent and I use it on a daily basis, but it's very buggy when it comes communicating with a wide range of services. I keep getting send mail issues on all of my Macs with a variety of accounts, for example - some of them can only be resolved by rebooting the entire computer. Often Mail won't close because it's hung up on some task it's unable to complete and I have to force close it etc. It's not great, which also goes for Apple's entire range of cloud services, unfortunately. At least there, Microsoft really shines - but you can easily use all of Microsoft's cloud services on Macs as well, so that's hardly an area where Windows as an OS is ahead of macOS.
Given the the latest news about the state of disrepair macOS development is in at the moment, I think all of these points will be moot within the next 2-3 years or so. Once Apple is making everyone use an iOS-like OS, the more demanding users will be heading over to the Microsoft camp whether they like it or not. Let's hope that by then, Microsoft has fixed the finder and is forcing devs to adopt the common modern design language and scalability guidelines. Google is a good example here - Android apps were the same kind of UI mess until they put their foot down and basically told everyone to finally fix the crappy UIs. The result now is that most recent Android apps not only follow a common design, they also look fantastic. And that's even having an effect on iOS apps, as devs are carrying over the same design to iOS apps
