My wife switched to Macs about 3 years ago. She hated it for the 1st month, just because it was 'different'. She uses MS Office for Mac, and exchanges files with a Windows only office as part of her job (she telecommutes). She is not at all techie, she just wants her computer to work. I do the tech support.
Tell your wife that a) My wife has fewer problems with Office than her Windows colleagues. The files transfer fine. b) My wife has fewer problems connecting to public wifis and hotel networks than her colleagues. c) When she needs to deal with an unusual challenge (for example two Macs, with the only one ethernet port in a room, with no wifi) we can configure the systems to share the internet in just a couple of minutes. I have no experience with Windows, so I don't know how easy or hard it is to do the same thing.... but the room of Windows laptops looked at us, and asked (rhetorically) "You can do that?" I just shrugged and said it was a Mac thing. There are several other examples where OS X makes things simple.
In other words, after several months, my wife decided not to kill me, and she wouldn't go back to Windows even if she could. She like the "Just Works" bit.
With that said, OS X is not perfect - and there are several things that drive her nuts. But on balance, it was a good switch for her.
To you - help her while your wife is switching. Be patient, she needs to learn it on her own. And finally, just get used to the fact that she is going to do things "Wrong" - by which I mean "Different Than You." Cope. She doesn't want to hear how she can do things more efficiently. And it will drive you batty for a while.
What convinced my wife was simply that I didn't know Windows at all, didn't want to learn, and told her that if she needed support she would need to find someone else to be her Guru (this was when she was leaving her corporate office work with its IT staff - to work from home.)
One last story.... My wife does have to go to a Virtualized Machine, in order to use a Windows only VPN client. One day her access wasn't working. Turned out the IT staff in the office had assigned everyone new passwords, but hadn't given out one to my wife. They used their Trouble Tickets to figure out who the employees were. ... (you can probably see where this is going) .... Since she had never needed to call in for support, there was no Trouble Ticket, so no record of her as far as the IT desk was concerned. It's not a great IT desk, admittedly.... but it's still a good story.
] and tell her that Office for Windows is pretty much the same as Office for Mac 2011. In fact tell her it's much better and she will LOVE it
