Heck, the "search" thing has been in the Start menu since Windows 95. But that was just a balls-out search of the whole disk or sub folder after you kicked it off. Under Vista, Windows 7, and OS X 10.4+ they have a service that crawls the disk and indexes the contents to make them available much quicker.
Actually, indexing services can be found as far back as Windows 2000. It's a pity it's such a complete frakking disk hog.
And in Vista/7 when you hit the Windows Key that's where the keyboard focus goes: the quick search box. And it ranks application links higher than other links when there's a hit. Much like Spotlight on OS X which is accessed with a quick Option+Spacebar.
I do think that if Apple hadn't done it first Microsoft would have gotten there eventually. It's not a game changing technology just a natural progression.
Yea, mildly helpful, but not a 'killer app' in and of itself, IMHO.
