This will likely look like flamebait, but some Mac users seem to constantly confuse the platform with the applications.

The fact is, the only lock-in in Windows is are Win32 APIs (which developpers seem to enjoy, since it's the most popular platform by orders of magnitude,) upon which you can run tens of thousands of applications. Speaking as someone with a 70Gb+ mp3 collection ripped from CDs and streams or downloaded, I'm glad I'm a Windows XP user.

I never needed Windows Media Player for encoding, metatagging, collection management, or playback, but I was able to choose from an unmatched choice of third-party tools for all these tasks.