Joel writes about the myriad choices in Vista just to turn it off in the “Start” (ho ho) menu. Moishe Lettvin, a developer on the team who developed this one menu item, goes on to describe a room full of managers and three week intervals between when code was written and when it showed up in the actual builds.

I think the picture says it all:

Conversely (because it’s always good to compare), the Apple menu has four neat items, always one click away: Sleep, Restart and Shutdown, with Log Out at the bottom. Of course, why anyone still switches off a computer these days is beyond me (why not just let automatic power management sort it out?) but there you go:

Oh, and just for completeness, here’s a screenshot of the iPod’s off switch:

[UPDATE]
Arno Gourdol, formerly lead of the Mac OS X Finder team, chimes in with the process that went into designing the same controls at Apple.