You've seen too many keynotes and believed too much of what has been preached to you.
1. The Mac division at Microsoft already has Snow Leopard, nobody there needs to start a photocopier. Adobe and Microsoft are the most important third party software developers for the Mac platform - you can bet that they get early releases of OS X even before the rest of the members of Apple's Developer Connection. Microsoft and Apple even have a patent deal that allows them to use each others patents. But even without that are there probably more relevant innovations and improvements in Windows 7 than there will be in Snow Leopard - Windows 7 targets a market of almost on BILLION installations in all spoken and written languages world-wide on the long term. Compared to this, all the big words in an Apple keynote are just... obnoxious marketing and say more about the narrow mindedness at Apple than they say about their competitors. (Heck, even Linux supports more languages and is available in more countries than OS X.)
2. Steve Ballmer probably doesn't care very much about Mac OS X Snow Leopard. More people already have downloaded the Release Candidate of Windows 7 than Apple will ever sell Snow Leopard licenses. Apple's market share in the OS sector still is completely insignificant when compared to Microsoft.
3. If Steve Ballmer is paying attention to anything that Apple is doing, then this will be the iPhone and iTunes, because the latter is the only area where Apple really is the heavy-weight that they claim to be. However, with DRM disappearing from online music (and soon video) sales and other giants like Amazon entering this market, Apple will have to do a lot of homework to keep their market dominance.
