No, this isn't even close to be the same. Vista asks you for confirmation of nearly everything you can possible do on the computer. At no point did OS X do this. While *installation* of applications have always asked for confirmation, and access to your Keychain has also, pretty much nothing else does. Vista, on the other hand, is about a gnat's hair away from asking you to confirm "Did you really want to click?"

I've used the beta. It's awful. The usability of the file "explorer" is atrociously convoluded. It makes it even more complicated to know what's going on that XP did. And, to keep this on topic-- the security measures are astoundingly invasive. Vista seemingly asks you to confirm the same type of function, triggered in the same way, but by different applications. Look, if I want port 80 HTTP requests to go through, I want them to go through all the frickin' time. Don't make me repeat myself. (Yes, this is only an example but it's indicative of the process you'll go through time and time again.)

Maybe it's the horrible presentation of the dialogs that does it? They offer ZERO information about what *application* (in English instead of seemingly random strings of letters and numbers!!!!) wants your attention. It also offers no real understanding of what is being asked of you. Microsoft, for all they did correctly with the xbox 360 interface, needs to learn how to design a dialog. Here's a fine example:

I open a jpeg file or some other seemingly harmless thing. I get a security alert box that unnecessarily shares the shit out of me with it's inappropriate use of iconography. It says something incomprehensible like this:

Application gobbleygook.exe is attempting to access suckit.dll. Do you want to want to allow this? (This is considered a minor threat.)

Oh. Great. So some EXE with a name I don't recognize wants access to a DLL (what's that-- hahaha?) that I also don't recognize. Now that I'm completely lost, Windows tells me this is not that much of a threat and I can probably click "allow" for the application I don't know to open the dll I don't know to do some task that I have no clue to what it's purpose is. Super.

I'm trying to make a point by being a bit funny about this-- but Microsoft really needs MAJOR improvement to this process. First, don't assume everything is a threat and scare a user into confirming something that is not needed. Second, improve the presentation. Third, figure out how to discen between Malware and your own software!