Reasonable, as per usual, to the point of understating.

RMS' critique of MacOS strike me as reasonable possibly understating the technical aspects of the harm Apple does to MacOS users. He gets to the heart of the matter -- the lack of respecting user's software freedom is the most important problem. Fixing this would give the community opportunity to fix the relatively minor issues I touch on below.

I administer a large set of MacOS machines (among other systems) in an AD-based university and as a result I've become very familiar with OD and how it works with AD. Some of the ideas I've seen Apple try to implement strike me as elegant and something others should use as well (I'd hope those working on policy programs for controlling free software take a look at a single scalable preferences description like Apple's plists). But I don't need the headaches of not being able to run MacOS X Server on a virtual machine (two local Apple reps tell me Apple doesn't support this), and I certainly don't need any DRM (DRM always gets in the way). Overall, I think Apple would be as uncooperative as Microsoft if Apple had the power to get away with it like Microsoft has.

But OpenDirectory (Apple's directory system) applications don't work that well in 10.5 (which a lot of MacOS users run today): login restrictions don't work properly (forcing me to use service ACLs which aren't nearly as well integrated, documented, and are completely unmanageable via WorkgroupManager); the WorkgroupManager application misbehaves frequently in 10.5 and doesn't manage machine lists well. I'm often left wanting a simple text list I can edit with any text editor; WorkgroupManager doesn't display nested groups in a way where you can figure out the nesting without looking at all of the groups. 10.6 is said to be a significant improvement here (except for the last problem, no change there). But 10.6 is costly in time and money. If 10.6 is what 10.5 should have been, I'd be peeved if I had paid for 10.5 and was asked to pay for fixes I should receive to get what I initially set out to have.

10.5's integration with Active Directory (AD) and services one finds used in conjunction with AD (like interoperability with Exchange email and calendaring). I'm willing to cut the free software hackers a lot of slack for lack of Exchange interoperation because Microsoft doesn't cooperate and they change their protocols and file formats to prevent interoperation. I expect commercial proprietors to deliver interoperable apps from day one because they can pay Microsoft to work with them and proprietors will sign NDAs that will keep their source code out of the users' hands. I, therefore, expect Apple to have delivered Exchange interoperation far before 10.5 but this is another thing that is only really getting off the ground in 10.6. I wouldn't be surprised if some protocol changes would leave Apple with no interoperability but keep Microsoft's apps working after a gratis update.

Over time I expect my headaches will diminish if I push more system maintenance on the students (as in "you buy your own laptop, you manage your own machine, we provide shared services and show you how to connect to said services"). But until then I'm left to work with the systems our students run.