Ever wondered about this match.........well here it is......

It's surprising when you consider that Apple has released two new versions of its operating system versions in the time since Microsoft let the world know that Windows 8 was baking. The Redmond software giant first announced plans for its upcoming desktop and tablet operating system in January 2011 at CES. Meanwhile, Apple released Lion, a major update, in July of that same year, and then Mountain Lion, a more incremental update, this past July.

In some ways, however, it's not so surprising: Windows 8 is a drastic re-imagining of the operating system, combining a touch-centric tablet OS with the traditional Windows desktop environment. Apple's strategy has been to more cautiously insert features from its mobile operating system, iOS, into the Mac's. It's also added multitouch gesture input support that assumes a touchpad for laptops or desktops. The result is ever-closer integration, with a minimum of dislocation to users—but no evolutionary leaps, either.

Microsoft has taken a far more drastic approach. It's designed Windows 8 to actually run on mobile tablets. Apple's wildly popular iPad by contrast runs its own version of iOS. While many old-timers have railed against the emphasis on touch input, it's easy to see why Microsoft took this approach: The company wants to leverage its massive 80 percent market share in desktop operating systems, while simultaneously familiarizing people with the new tile-based interface (formerly known as "Metro") first used in Windows Phone. But desktop users get benefits from Windows 8, too, including much faster startup and better boot security.

While Lion and Mountain Lion have been at large in the wild for months, we've also gotten a pretty good look at Windows 8, thanks to three pre-release publicly available versions: Developer Preview, Consumer Preview, and Release Preview. There's little mystery at this point about Windows 8's final shape when it's finally released on October 26, and developers and journalists have even already reviewed the RTM—release to manufacturing—version. So how do these two new operating systems' stack up? I'll take a look in some key areas. If there are important contrasts you'd like to point out, please do so in the comments; this list is by no means exhaustive!

Windows 8's Mobile-like User Interface

Windows 8's new interface shows more influence from Windows Phone than OS X Mountain Lion does from iOS. Window 8's large, touchable "live tiles" give quick access to and display info from your apps. Swiping gestures actually do a better job of letting you do everything using your thumbs than iOS does—which makes sense, since you mostly hold a tablet from both sides. The legacy "desktop interface," looks a lot like Windows 7, though gone is the eye candy of the latter's translucent Aero Glass effects. Also gone is the Start button, replaced by the tiled Start page.

Mountain Lion's Mobile-Inspired Elements

With a couple of important exceptions, most of Mountain Lion's inherited traits from iOS arrived with Lion or before. These include the App Store and Launchpad, which duplicates iOS's app icons, even letting you group them just as you would on an iPhone. Unfortunately, most of the Mac users I talk to never use Launchpad, preferring the traditional dock icons.

New for Mountain Lion is iMessage—iOS's messaging service that can take the place of SMS text messaging. It's pretty cool to be able to simulate an SMS text chat with one person on an iPhone and the other at her Mac desktop.

Another gift from iOS is Notification Center, which acts just like the mobile OS's notifications, which you see when you swipe down from the top of the screen. In Mountain Lion, you can swipe in from the left on a touchpad, and it shows an entry for each new email, message, software update, or calendar alert.

Mountain Lion's Cloud Service: iCloud

With Mountain Lion, iCloud becomes more important for Apple's desktop operating system. When you sign into your Apple account on a Mountain Lion Mac, all your mail settings, contacts, Safari bookmarks, messages, iTunes backups and other features will be synced via iCloud. And when you launch the App Store, all the apps you purchased earlier through the App Store are available for downloading and installation. Mountain Lion also builds cloud-based file storage into TextEdit, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Microsoft makes SkyDrive simply available to any app developer, and many Windows 8 apps already take advantage of this.

Windows 8's Cloud Service: SkyDrive

I covered Microsoft's SkyDrive service extensively in Windows 8 and the Cloud: SkyDrive. Like iCloud, SkyDrive can sync all your devices' settings; in fact, Microsoft likes referring to SkyDrive as a "device cloud." In addition to this function, the service can serve as simple online storage, and actually works with Macs and iOS devices as well as Windows, Android, and Windows Phone. Just as with iCloud, SkyDrive remembers which apps you've purchased and lets you download and install them on another machine you sign in to your Microsoft Account.

A big difference between SkyDrive and iCloud is that it offers Web access to any files you've stored on it. But SkyDrive becomes more than just a service for Microsoft products: Any Windows 8 third-party apps can make use of it as well, storing files to the cloud and retrieving them back. Another cool capability of SkyDrive is Fetch, which lets you grab a file from a PC running the SkyDrive software even if the desired file hasn't been uploaded to the online storage.

The Mac App Store

Apple's mobile OS showed the value to a platform maker of offering an app store: The store owner can control which apps are offered, and more importantly, collect a premium from the software maker. But the user gets something out of this setup, too: You can install purchased apps on any of your other Macs, and updates are handled uniformly, with notifications when they're available. The Mac App Store launched with about a thousand apps, but some estimate there are now about 10,000.

Windows 8's App Store: The Windows Store

Microsoft finally got hip to the app store concept and decided to build it into its hybrid tablet/desktop OS. In many respects, the Windows Store works nearly identically to Apple's: It lets you install apps you've purchased on multiple machines you sign into, and handles updating in a unified manner. The terms for developers get to letting them keep a bit more of the proceeds. Store isn't as rich in browsing options as Mac App Store, since you have to page through the categories. The Windows Store is estimated to launch with about a thousand apps, and there are millions of legacy Windows apps that will still run on Intel-based Windows 8 machines.

Windows 8's Browser: Internet Explorer 10

IE10 comes in two flavors—new and desktop. The new (formerly known as "Metro") IE10 is full screen and touch-friendly, while the desktop IE10 uses an interface identical to its IE9 predecessor. Both guises use the same underlying webpage rendering engine, which is faster and more compliant with new standards than IE9. Internet Explorer 10 not only takes hardware acceleration using a PC's graphics processor up a notch, but implements far more HTML5. These are important factors, since many new Windows 8 apps will use IE as their own rendering engine. Like Apple's Safari, IE10 under Windows 8 will allow syncing of favorites and history.

Mountain Lion's Browser: Safari 6

One of the major new pieces of Mountain Lion was Safari 6. Notably, the Windows version of Safari hasn't come along for this update, so Apple's browser is starting to look like the Mac and iOS exclusive that IE is on Windows and Windows Phone. With version 6, Safari has joined most new browsers' design choice of using a single box for address entry and search. Safari’s Cloud Tab feature shows you the tabs that are open on your other devices, so you can resume browsing after moving from one device to another. The updated browser also has a new tab view that lets you swipe through large thumbnails.

Sharing from Mountain Lion

Apps in Mountain Lion get a new Sharing arrow button that lets them post whatever current item you're on by posting directly to email, iMessage, Twitter, Flickr, or Vimeo. Coming in the Fall will be the one place we all really want to share digital stuff to—Facebook. This sharing tool will not only let you post photos and links, but you'll be able to add comments and location info.

Sharing from Windows 8

Windows 8 has a built in Sharing button that's always available from the "charms" toolbar. You can call this up at any time by moving the mouse to the upper or lower-right corner of the screen or by swiping in from the right on a touchscreen. The Share charm taps in to email, SkyDrive, and any social network you've connected to the built-in Windows 8 People app.

Extra Goodies in Windows 8

Microsoft has built several useful and fun new-style apps that ship with Windows 8, including Mail, Photos, People, Messaging, Weather, Finance, Calendar, Maps, News, Sports, Music, and Video. Many of these display live updated info on their Start page tiles—something not possible on the Mac OS X desktop or even in iOS. Windows 8's Metro Snap feature lets you get a peek at a second app while running your primary app in full screen. A final new pair of goodies in Windows 8 will be the ability to "Refresh" or "Reset" the system. With the first, you keep all your apps but clean out all the operating system gunk files, and with the second, you get a completely new Windows installation—perfect for gifting an older machine to a relative.

And speaking of older machines, perhaps the biggest "extra" for Windows 8 is that its desktop mode can run every Windows legacy app. Not only has it been updated with a more-modern, flat window border look, but Windows Explorer and Task Manger have been updated with new looks and capabilities. Drastically faster startup than previous versions of Windows could also be considered an extra, though it's also become an essential for any platform with mobile aspirations, given the iPad's fast startup.

Extra Goodies in Mountain Lion

Mac OS X's AirDrop feature stands out among its extra goodies: It lets you transfer files to any nearby Mac without disks, USB keys, or even a WiFi connection. Other nifty capabilities outlined are Auto Save and Versions, which mean you never have to worry about losing a document because you forgot to hit Save. The problem is: Software vendors aside from Apple itself have been slow to implement support for Lion's built-in Versions and AutoSave. Find My Mac does for your laptop what's been possible on the iPhone for years. Longtime goodies for Mac users include Preview and QuickTime, which let you view most of the media and document file types you're likely to download.

New for Mountain Lion is Dictation, which lets you talk whenever you'd normally have to type. This is something that's been in iOS 5.1, and I find it incredibly useful. New, too, is Game Center—also with iOS roots—which lets you manage all your gaming apps and activities. It also connects you to a gaming network, with leaderboards, achievements, in-game chat, and notifications. Speaking of notifications, don't forget the goodies coming from iOS mentioned earlier, including the Notification Center and iMessage.