Sorry to disagree with you again, but I think that's subjective.

Obviously, that's true. But let me defend my point.

I have an Apple laptop that has an 800x600 screen. That's what I'm using right now. If I leave the dock at full size so that icons are readable, it takes up too much of the screen. If I make it a reasonable amount of the screen, it's unreadable. The magnification allows me to have the best of both worlds. Hiding the dock/toolbar is also a reasonable method, one which Windows has been capable of for a while, as MacOSX is, too. But the magnification is, IMO, more intuitive, as I can see what's down there without having to move my mouse. Or I can move my mouse in order to get more precise information.

The dislike of window whisking I can understand, but there's also a point to that. It shows you where that window has been minimized to. So if you're paying attention, you can click on it directly without having to search for it.

My point is that it's not just random ``beautification''. It has a purpose. You may not appreciate that purpose or like the manner in which it was implemented, but there's reasoning behind it.

As a counter-example, take Windows's menu transitions, where the menus can fade in or expand out when selected. I cannot come up with a rational reason why that could be useful. It just wastes my time waiting for the menu to render. It's just gee-whiz. A menu effect that Apple has is that a selected item in a menu flashes once or twice after you select it. This would seem to be time wasting, too, but it gives you real feedback about what menu item was actually selected. All of us have missed a menu item by a few pixels numerous times, I'm sure, but without that feedback, you have to wait and see what happens.

And, like I said, Apple is not without random beautification failures. Dragging something off of the dock creates a puff of smoke animation. It give you a little feedback, but the fact that the item is now gone would have been enough. That sort of thing has no real purpose. But my argument is that Microsoft is guilty of that much more than Apple is and does less to try to actually improve the UI.