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Making clones and enabling MAC OS X on any PC is a different matter. A big part of Mac OS X quality comes from a small variety of hardware: Apple can update Mac OS X much faster than MS, with much fewer resources, and I have no doubt that not having to support all the crappy hardware out there is a big reason for it. Hey, I own a macbook to run linux on it, because apple hardware, while not extraordinary, is relatively standard and does not change much between revision.

I am pretty sure Linux (the kernel) has more resources than Apple today, and it still does not support as much hardware as windows (in the desktop PC ecosystem, of course). If a clone crashes Mac OS X, who is to blame ? Apple cost for QA would grow significantly.

And also, Apple products are seen as a kind of luxury product: being more expensive and limited than a PC is a feature.

Apple also has a long history of abandoning old users and destroying reverse compatibility with upgrades - something MS simply doesn't do (which is one of the reasons that MS remains the producer of the most vulnerable OS on the market, but also one of the reasons many people stick with them). Sure, Apple are an agile company, but it's entirely at the consumer's expense in many cases.

Most of the windows hardware support is actually contributed by the hardware manufacturers writing drivers...

OSX is similar, in that the hardware vendor is also the OS vendor so they are both developed together. It's not hard for an OEM who is selling complete products based on a set of components to get the specs for those components.

Linux on the other hand relies primarily on third parties to write the drivers, a lot of manufacturers don't produce linux drivers for their hardware and some don't release specs at all.

I see that argument frequently - yet I haven't encountered a single person who would actually suggest that Apple should be required to actively support OS X on non-Apple hardware. And that's a rarity, IME - if the Internet has taught me nothing else: no matter how inane an idea is, someone will genuinely advocate it.

That argument also presents a false-dichotomy: there is lots of middle ground between actively supporting something, and actively going out of your way to prevent something.

I think most people would be happy with an OEM-only version of OS X, with 30pt bold, right red text on the front saying "DOES NOT COME WITH SUPPORT" (that is generally the way one-off OEM software purchases work anyway).

And who would buy something that like that? Two main types of people: geeks/enthusiasts and OEMs. In other words, people who wouldn't have any need for support from Apple.