Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly because Microsoft was unbeatable, Longhorn UI ideas survived as WPF, while the OS components were rescued into C++ and COM, clunky as Windows Vista, and refined into Windows 7, including a kernel rewrite via the MinWin project. They are on a similar position nowadays, trying to fix the UWP disaster, maybe by a future Windows 12 we get what Windows 8 should have been all along. Likewise, starting from the same…
Copland UI ideas and code survived and shipped in Mac OS 8. Multithreaded Finder, Platinum Theme (multiple themes in fact, though killed at the last moment), windows as tabs at the bottom of the screen. However the main challenge, memory protection, didn't. Much like Longhorn's file system.
In any case this is playing guessing games, what would have happened if Apple wasn't begging for money.
So who knows how System 9, 10… would have turned out.
As for the Longhorn example, part of it did ship, as SQL Server features and some ideas on ReFS.