The Windows task bar these days behaves almost exactly like the Mac OS dock and has since Windows 7. The main difference is if you click on an application with

The Windows task bar these days behaves almost exactly like the Mac OS dock and has since Windows 7. The main difference is if you click on an application with multiple windows open, it pops up a window selector (tip, ctrl+click to cycle through the windows instead) instead of whatever Mac OS does (some combo of bring up the main/latest-used window of the application). You can enable the Vista and earlier behavior—listing all open windows and not grouping by application—but I imagine very few people do.