The Microsoft taskbar has always had the most prominent feature of the dock: Allowing you to organize and launch apps from a bar on the left/right/bottom of your screen. Prior to Windows 7 though, you could only add shortcuts to the taskbar and when you launched an app from that shortcut a wholly separate taskbar button would appear.
Starting with Windows 7, Microsoft merged the functionality of launching apps into the taskbar buttons. This way, when you "pin" an app to the taskbar and then click on the pinned item, the pinned item became the taskbar button which represented the running app. This is how the Mac dock works. I think that the only major feature of the Mac dock that Microsoft doesn't offer is "recent apps" but I could be forgetting something since I haven't used Windows for work in a while.
In the end, as per usual, Microsoft lets you have it both ways. If you want a dock you can leave the taskbar configured as default (grouping taskbar buttons and collapsing them into a single button) or you can turn that off and have the original taskbar functionality. If you add something like 7+ Taskbar Tweaker you can even ungroup them, drag and drop taskbar buttons to re-organize them and enable "middle click" to close the window represented by the taskbar buttons like you would with browser tabs.
When I moved my workstations/work laptop all to Manjaro/XFCE I was happily surprised to find that XFCE taskbar has all the features of 7+ Taskbar Tweaker. I don't know what XFCE's design philosophy is, but if I had to guess it's "Implement all the desirable features of Windows in a minimalist fashion and add features for power users."