“It’s a given that Windows 7, scheduled for release in two weeks, is an improvement over Vista,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune. “But how does it stack up against Apple’s Snow Leopard?”

Elmer-DeWitt reports, “The definitive word comes in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal and All Things Digital from Walt Mossberg, the diminutive dean of tech journalists and a man who takes his software reviews seriously. After testing Windows 7 for nine months on 11 different machines, he has pronounced it ‘the best version of Windows Microsoft has produced.’”

“Anybody who is seriously interested in using Microsoft’s latest operating system should read the whole review,” Elmer-DeWitt reports. “But if you want to know what’s wrong with Windows 7, we’ve excerpted the juicy bits from Mossberg’s review.”

Here are a few of Walt’s own words to whet your appetite:
• On a couple of these machines, glacial start-up and reboot times reminded me of Vista.
• On a couple of others, after upgrading, key features like the display or touchpad didn’t work properly.
• Windows 7 still requires add-on security software that has to be frequently updated.
• It’s tedious and painful to upgrade an existing computer from XP to 7
• The system for upgrading is complicated, but Vista owners can upgrade to the exactly comparable edition of Windows 7 while keeping all files, settings and programs in place. Unfortunately, XP owners, the biggest body of Windows users, won’t be able to do that.

Many more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s marketing department needs to pound that last bullet point into the ground and then pound it some more. Also, the more help Apple can give to Windows PC users looking to make the upgrade to Mac OS X, the better.