According to this article at Forbes.com, there's one place where Vista beats Leopard--speech recognition... huh?

An article at Forbes.com wittily entitiled Deaf Leopard makes the claim that "when it comes to speech recognition, Microsoft is way out front" of Apple's Mac OS X.

What's that you say? Mac OS X has had built-in speech recognition since day one. Forbes columnist Brian Caulfield agrees, but claims that "all" it can do is "recognize simple voice commands," while Vista can do "far more."

Far more, you say, Brian? Such as... what? The only source you cite in your article points to a demo of Vista's capabilities in this area that went so badly the feature was more aptly described as "voice wreck-ognition."

And how soon they forget! Does anyone else recall the brouhaha right after Vista was released, when it was discovered that downloaded sound files could trigger arbitrary system commands (e.g., deleting all files on the C drive) if played through the speakers while voice recognition was turned on? Is that a bug or a feature, Brian? (What was Microsoft's workaround for this?)

I would be more inclined to agree in principle with your quote from Greg DeMichillie, who said that he's "yet to have a really good speech recognition experience." The technology, both hardware and software, is still not mature enough to achieve a consistently satisfactory user experience. Cries of "where's my jet pack?" well up from the crowd—we all expected that we'd be able to dictate documents to our computers by now. But we can't. And claiming that Microsoft somehow has a lead in this department is just plain hooey.