Mac hardware at the time had a pinstripe look, just the same. Today the interface has an "aluminum" look, as do today's Macs.
It goes to show that great product design is often more fashion than timelessness.
Most fashion-followers just specced a teal translucent instead of the beige they'd been using, left the design the same, and called it a day.
When Aqua was presented people loved it people hated it but nobody could ignore it. The first time you installed Mac OS X made you feel like you were in a whole new world.
Of course it wasn't that practical and funnily most of it has reverted back... before they pinstripes got faded, then we got the metallic grey, and now just a nice subtle grey.
All that is left from those old days are the traffic light buttons, the gem-blue scroll bars, and the standard button look.
What are you talking about? The pinstripes date all the way back to System 1. The modern OS X looks different from 10.0 but a lot more like 10.0 than like System 9.
True, but they were a _lot_ nicer. I remember at the time people complaining a lot about OS X look, including the stripes, and wanted the old look back. So I guess most of us don't feel like they are really the same. But I get your point.
As for the look of Snow Leopard vs. MacOS 9 and MacOS X 10.0 I'd say a lot has reverted back. The old one in particular used a lot of greys, which OS X at the beginning was trying to get away from ("Look, it's all colourful!").
So yeah, maybe I exaggerated when I said most of it, but you've got to admit that the look has moved back to the more subtle ways of Classic than the flashy ways of 10.0, no?
although I suppose most people were still using Windows Me, the last DOS-based Windows, rather than Windows 2000, which descended from NT. They looked pretty similar, though:
http://www.google.com/images?q=windows+me+screenshot
Windows XP was released a year later and was the first release to unify the workstation and desktop lines on the same foundation (with the Home & Professional variants).
At the time, Windows beat OS X in some areas that are no longer important.. like very easy to resize windows and more consistent minimize/maximize behavior, all of which are less important in a high resolution world.