Walter Mossberg, the tech columnist at the Wall Street Journal, wrote an article today on the new Windows 7, which he says is a huge improvement over Vista. In fact he says Windows 7 may be as good as Mac OS X.

Here are a few places where he says the Mac still beats Windows:

1) Speed. He installed Windows 7 on a number of machines and finds startup time faster than Vista, but he says Mac still is faster than Windows for start and restart time in almost all cases.

2) Networking. He says Mac is still more “natural” at networking than Windows 7.

3) Install and upgrade. He had some trouble upgrading to Windows 7 from Vista, with key features not working properly after the upgrade on some machines, and others having drastic slowdown issues. He says “It’s tedious and painful to upgrade an existing computer from XP to 7, and the variety of editions in which Windows 7 is offered is confusing.” Whereas the Mac of course is easy to upgrade and there’s only one edition.

4) Included software. Windows 7 doesn’t include “email, photo organizing, address book, calendar and video-editing programs” although they can be downloaded free. Still, it’s an extra step. And honestly, who is going to use a computer without email? The extra step really isn’t optional.

And he should have mentioned these points where (in my opinion) OS X is superior also:

5) Viruses. It is still true, and will likely be true for awhile (as Apple still has only approx 10% market share) that the number of viruses written for Windows are vast compared to the number out there for OS X. Mossberg does say that Windows 7 allows you more control over the virus protection software so it doesn’t bug you quite as often as previous systems did, but that obscures the fact that it is still much easier for your Windows computer to be infected.

6) Copycat. It sounds like Windows 7 copied a lot of the cool things in Leopard/Snow Leopard, such as the Dock, Exposé, the ability to easily size open windows to the full screen, and the “recent items” selection in the Apple menu.

7) Hardware. We all know how easy it is when the same company is responsible for hardware and software on your machine. Everything works together so much more seamlessly.

So take that, Windows.