It
was too much for the hardware. 7 years later it's not such a big deal, but then 7 years from now I don't suppose Vista's glitz will be too much, either. It took at least 4-5 years before Apple's consumer machines could run Aqua really
well. Even my 2005 model Mac Mini leaves a little to be desired. It doesn't support Core Image, although thankfully Apple has not Core Image that much, so it's no biggie. (I wonder if that will change with Leopard.)
Anyway, to answer the original post, in a word: yes.
As with OSes past, Microsoft has made many small changes to Apple's designs, and most of them are for the worse. That's to be expected. I mean, we're talking about a company that didn't consider that when they moved the Apple menu to the bottom of the screen, they had to reverse the order of the items so that "Shut Down" was not the
first item. That's pretty dense. (Of course, it's possible they weren't copying. They might have come up with that little gem of interface design all on their own.....but that's even worse.)
That said, I'm impressed with Aero.
That said, I've never actually had to
use it...