I myself wouldn't mind seeing OPEN LOOK. Now that was a GUI which looked as it had been designed by a competent graphic designer, rather than a borderline-autistic engineer whose sense of aesthetics never got past "chunky shaded boxes look k3wl" (as seen in countless 1980s Commodore 64 shoot-em-ups). Pity that Sun caved in to Motif's market dominance and killed it.
actually i run a few of those cosmetic programs - not only it is nice to get rid of 'fisher price' look of windows xp, it also makes it easier to get used to the Macs at college - if only there was a program that added an extra button to Mac mice, i wouldn't need to carry a USB mouse in my bag every day...
as for spyware - a problem, but i guess it's more user-related than OS- related. simply put, windows having the largest market share, has by far the bigger share of dumb users who open obviously suspicious-looking e-mail attachments.
You remember Open Look too fondly.
Have you ever used Open Look? It was the dooviest looking GUI of its time (well, for anyone not owning one of those black magnesium NeXT cubes, anyway, and even that's debatable).
I'm still waiting for the Motif emulator for XP...