When Steve Jobs died there was lots of chatter among management gurus regarding how his leadership style was unique and could not be replicated.

Wrong. Jobs’ leadership style — brilliant insights, deep involvement in the details, and lots of temperament — isn’t even uncommon. You’ll find it in many and possibly most of the great restaurants.

What Steve Jobs was was a chef, with his own unique style of haute cuisine. What made him unusual was his ability to scale it up. Maybe someone should compare him to Wolfgang Puck.

And, I guess, Steve Ballmer to Betty Crocker.

Anyway, I’m well into my third month using a Windows 8 tablet (how’s that for a segue?) and I can’t remember a single occasion when I wished I had my iPad instead.

Full disclosure: I’m a Dell guy (Dell Global Business Consulting; I don’t offer advice on Dell’s products, which is just as well — the product side has never asked for it). This isn’t an endorsement for Latitude 10 tablets (what I use). In particular, while I’ve never once wished I had my iPad with me instead (just having Windows Explorer instead of nothing is enough for me to prefer my Windows 8 tablet), I have on occasion wished the Latitude 10 had the iPad’s battery life — I figure the Latitude gets about 5 hours with constant business use.

Another wish: That Microsoft’s designers were more passionate about getting the details right, and that Steve Ballmer had some master chef in him.

In particular, when in desktop (aka Windows 7) mode, pinch and zoom should scale the whole display, instead of operating the slider control or equivalent. The single biggest irritant in the whole system is that on a tablet, the controls for desktop applications are teeny-tiny things, which you hope you hit dead-center with your finger.

If Steve Jobs’ Apple is a restaurant serving haute cuisine, Microsoft is more like, say, Chili’s — fast food with pretentions.

Another place the Windows 8 meal is edible but not delicious is inking.

OneNote with inking is simply fantastic. The best that can be said about any of the iPad ink-based note-taking apps is that the results are legible. OneNote with inking is like writing with pen on paper, only with multiple levels of organization … and very acceptable handwriting recognition besides.

But then, Microsoft had to go and be Microsoft again. Bring up Word, or start writing an email, and while you can ink, there’s no handwriting recognition. Yes, you can write into the handwriting-alternative keyboard, but that isn’t the same as just writing on the page and converting it to text when you’re ready.

Speaking of Microsoft being Microsoft: One of the cooler features built into the Windows 8 / Office 2013 / tablet combo is annotation. Bring up any MS Office document. Use your stylus to annotate it. It’s literally just like marking up a paper document with a pen.

I did this, marking up an agenda to make sure I didn’t forget anything. This converted a ~200KByte document to a ~2MByte document. That’s a bit much for just overlaying a page of scribbles onto a page of Office-formatted text. While in an age of dirt-cheap storage this isn’t all that big of a deal, it’s still a deal and indicative of general sloppiness … sort of like a chef whose solution to every flavor challenge is adding more salt.

Not really but no other food-oriented metaphor occurred to me.

One other point: Yes, as so many commentators have pointed out, the Windows 8 gesture system is less intuitive than its iOS counterpart. This tells you more about the commentators than the system. What most of them have missed is that the Windows 8 gesture system lets you do more stuff than you can in iOS. Doing more stuff means more gestures, which means more complexity (and learning).

This is my beef with most of the industry ragging on Windows 8.

Yes, the user interface matters. It matters a lot. It isn’t, however, the entire story. Read most iPad/Windows tablet comparisons and you’ll be hard pressed to find anything at all that isn’t about the user interface. Microsoft’s advertising gets this one exactly right: When the time comes to do actual work, Windows 8 tablets, warts and all, are what your users are going to want.

Not what you (assuming you represent IT) should impose on them. It’s what they’re going to want.

I know this because everyone who’s seen my tablet has said the same thing: “I wish my iPad did that.”