First let me say this. I support Apple, fully, I have a mini, both pre-intel and intel. I have TWO Ibooks, Had a pre-intel IMac and have an intel 17" intel IMac, got the IPod video, Point is I don't look down on the company. HOWEVER. Apple as a company has never looked at them selfs as a software company, but insted a hardware company and I think that has been thier downfall from the start. While I will NEVER argue with anyone that OS X is a FAR better OS than Windows, reality is most people have never had the chance to even use OS X. Why? Because Apple is not a software company, but a hardware company.
As a consumer you go to the store and you see an Apple, and a WinPC next to each other (if you can find such a store that has both, mind you) and they see the price. One can be as cheap as as say $350.00, WITH OS, WITH ALL THINGS NEEDED TO RUN IT and the other can be as cheap as $599.00, no keyboard, mouse, moniter, just a lil box. Now in most peoples minds they do the same thing, on the surface they do. Granted it's not till later that they find all the problems that come with MS XP. This is why they (Apple) will never be even close to #1, because in reality most people that purchase computers don't need it for anything more than everyday things. Email, internet, music, simple things.
Software companys are NEVER going to take time, money, and resources just to make software work on an Apple to please a few people, and I say few lightly, but in the scope of percentage, it is few as far as sales go.
I know I know everyone says that Apple is a hardware company and that's the reason thier OS works so great, and runs so great, and and and. But Serious think about it. We all bash, and beat up on MS because we say the OS sucks but is it really the OS? Or the other people making the software that allows the OS to get jacked up. I know I know, MS has put out some sorry a*s OS's, Win Me, 98, yah they were jacked from the code up. But (and I'm not sticking up for anything) XP is really not AS BAD as we all tear it up to be. I don't download crap, free games, P2P and my lil crap Dell Laptop works just fine, day in day out. My mom's however, she's always calling me, it's not working, it's slow, it's this and that, becuase she downloads those stupid 'free' casino games. Free in one aspect but costing you in the aspect of performance.
If OS X had had the market share that MS has, I have NO DOUBT, that there would be the same problems that exist with XP. Why would these companys that can barley afford to make a program and have to put ad aware in with the install to pay for the software, IE p2p software. There are ways to get such programs installed on a mac, the ad programs, it's not like Apple goes out of thier way to make sure that a program can not open a safari window to show an ad.
All I'm saying is that fact of the matter is untill Apple gets market share up by providing an OS to the vast majority of people without forceing them to buy thier hardware, software companys won't really look at it as A MUST to have thier software on OS X. I really wish Apple would dip it's feet in the software world, just give us a DVD to install X on any computer, don't give us support unless we use your hardware. But then again, then all these companys that hardly know how to make a decent peice of hardware would then have to make a peice of software to make that hardware run. And in lies more of the problem with XP, and the future of ANY OS that allows install on any machine and has a decent market share. That OS is not around yet, but when it is, the same problems will surface.
Lets see MS open up thier source code for a few decades and I guarantee we'd get it fixed and running right. Apple was VERY smart to use the base code of such an OS, one that was open for a very long time and that people that cared fixed and fixed and fixed again.
You are not running a VPC or something like that where it emulates Windows inside your OS X. This solution is dual-boot, meaning when you turn your computer you choose to load either OS X or Win XP. When you need to switch, you have to power down and choose the other operating system. 
