I kind of agree. Granted, I haven't actually
used Vista, but from screenshots, the appearance seems shockingly non-half-assed for a Microsoft product. Like, at least 3/4-assed.
This is really to be expected. Both Microsoft and Apple created their interfaces for hardware that was not common at the time. Apple did this 7 years ago. Microsoft is doing it now, so naturally it's more technologically advanced. Vista uses the equivalent of OS X's Core Image, which didn't exist until Tiger and was not supported all across the board until the Intel Macs came out.
I had previously assumed Leopard would make greater use of Core Image (for better or worse). I'm still not convinced it won't. There's still plenty of time.
I've always been a critic of Apple's design philosophy. I
still think OS X has too much pointless glitz, and I'm not eager to see more. Even with Quartz Extreme and Core Image, the fact is that these things do NOT come "for free". They're simply a helluva lot faster than they'd be
without the technologies, which really isn't saying much. For proof, try using ShadowKiller for a few minutes. You will notice the increase in responsiveness. (And then you'll notice that everything is unusably ugly, because OS X windows have no outlines aside from the shadows.)
The thing is, Apple likes consistency, if not across their applications, then across their user base. This is why they killed the themes feature in 8.5 after it was already complete, and have never introduced anything similar since (even though it'd be a lot easier in OS X). Microsoft is happy to let people without next year's hardware use a completely different interface. I can't imagine Apple doing that. So whatever Apple does, I expect it to be more or less backwards-compatible. A few absent effects on older hardware would be fine — they currently do this with the dashboard ripple and the mouse shadow — but I don't think they're going to build a new interface around Core Image until they're ready to really pull the plug on older hardware.