One of the well-known benefits of Apple's platforms is that there's loads of enthusiastic developers trying really hard to build software that meshes well with the platform and with popular services and tools. You see things like DayOne, which (at least used to) use iCloud and Dropbox as storage services, and desktop productivity software such as Pixelmator, BBedit, Affinity, plus different mail clients, among other things. There's usually an app for that, and a lot of those apps have been ported to the iPad.
On the Windows side of that, there's a little less often "an app for that" and a little more often it's the case that you can do that with Office or Creative Cloud. These days, Windows enjoys some but not a whole lot of third party software lovingly crafted specifically for Windows, and a lot more open source software that gets ported and happens to work "well enough" because many of the Linux desktop environments are modeled after Windows, or some combination of Windows and the Classic Mac OS, sometimes only in overarching concept, sometimes in both concept and chrome. As an example, there are two or three but not two or three dozen lovingly handcrafted platform specific artisanal text editors and Markdown word processors. At least one of these comes from Microsoft itself in the form of Visual Studio Codee.
There's a lot of ecosystem problems that go into this, most of which probably contribute to the fact that the Windows UWP store is, relatively speaking, a barren wasteland. There's stuff in there, but this stuff is usually cut rate offerings, a lot of it is Microsoft itself publishing 'dexes and some of it is Microsoft's own contribution to third party services. Other things are just junk such as "$MUSICIAN music!" which will usually be links to YouTube videos embedded in an HTML view on the app.
One of the most striking examples of this is journaling software. A few years ago, I started to use a piece of software called DayOne on my iPhone and iPad, quickly buying it for my Mac so I could type entries in more comfort. More recently, it has occurred to me that perhaps the reason something like this doesn't exist on Windows is that Microsoft has a bunch of different alternatives within its own ecosystem. Word comes with journal and blog templates, OneNote is literally structured around a journal or notebook-like collection of pages, which are automatically dated when you create them, and perhaps the most oddly specific example, is that Outlook has included for almost twenty years a "journal" function.
Originally, apparently, meant to integrate tightly with the rest of the Office suite, as a way to log what work you were doing, the Journal function of Outlook is now deprecated (along with Notes.) Interestingly, I don't know whether or not Microsoft meant this, but if you select the "Note" option in the Journal, it becomes a really great…. Journal. As in, like, a personal journal. The unfortunate thing is that (unlike Notes, and the two types of items aren't compatible) you can only use Journal entries in desktop Outlook on Windows.
Interestingly, Notes can sync via Active Sync and you can view and use Notes on Macs and iOS devices.
Unfortunately, Journal is deprecated as of 2013. It's still in Office 2016, but Microsoft hasn't said exactly for how long. Tasks is an extremely interesting suggestion for a replacement. Notes is essentially unusable as a replacement, because you aren't able to edit Notes' properties, and because any time you open a Note to edit it, it becomes a Note of that moment, and loses its original timestamp information. It will be interesting to see how long the folder and the ability to manually work with journal entries is there. I imagine Microsoft was able to rip a lot of code out in 2013, and there's probably not a whole lot left that's specific to the journal.
I think that with a little more support for, say, ActiveSync, and with functionality for more of its own platforms (Windows Phone, Windows 10) and other software such as Outlook on Mac, I could see the journal continuing to be an important part of the still massive PIM capabilities of Outlook. Especially given the search functionality Outlook has, along with things like folders, category tagging, and the ability to choose that a journal entry is "for" different things. For somebody keeping an actual personal journal in Outlook, other potential advantages include some pretty nice formatting capabilities, as well as the ability to insert media inline. Basically, anything you can do in an e-mail in Outlook, you can do in a journal.
At the end of the day, unless I bother to actually sit down for a few days and transcribe my DayOne entries (which will be difficult because DayOne and desktop Outlook for Windows do not exist on any of the same computers) I probably won't switch to it. It would be just my luck that they actually remove the functionality when I go do it. It's tempting to let the Surface RT hang out for the purpose of doing older Outlook functions, but that probably won't happen unless the Office licensing situation gets wild, or somehow I end up being unable to procure newer PC hardware and need to use the RT for my blogging functionality.
This whole situation though, is pretty interesting. Does the fact that Microsoft (and Adobe) have products for nearly every conceivable situation actually have an impact on the market for small artisanal applications for Windows, or does that have more to do with demographics, the fact that Open Source applications look and work better on Windows than on Mac OS, or some combination of those things? For as many Windows developers and applications as there are, is there something different about Windows developers that causes them not to do these things, am I just not seeing them, or is there just a lack of excitement specifically for Windows as a platform? A lot of Mac developers are excited not only about meeting a need and building a tool, but specifically for Apple's platforms, and a lot of the Mac developers have since crossed over into the iOS space.
There could even be other structural causes for this ambivalence. Despite a reputation for long compatibility of applications, Microsoft is known to almost entirely change the expectations for how to set up an application on Windows, and many of its own applications use custom interface elements and disregard the conventions on how the interface should work. It's hard to want to make your Windows app look great and fit in with the whole system when it's really likely that a new major version of the OS will be released and completely change the conventions (and possibly even an interface toolkit or an entire API you were using) in as little as two years.
My heart goes out to anybody who actually put effort into a good Metro app with Windows 8, only to have the expectations changed lightly for Windows 8.1 and then massively for Windows 10, which started public beta cycles in late 2014, only two years after the public retail release of Windows 8. (This is only a little unfair, Windows 10 "10240" was released in July 2015, only about two years and four months after the public release of Windows 8.) This was all after a late-in-the-game change to Microsoft's recommendations for interface development on Windows 7, which went from regular Windows Forms to XAML forms, the most prominent example of which was probably the Zune client software, which despite being "for" Windows 7 and "not for" Windows 8, looked weird on 7 and really good on 8.
Today, my heart goes out to you if you put effort into a UWP application. I'd love to see some good UWP software show up, but I just can't get beyond the feeling that Microsoft is going to kill off UWP in a few years after it becomes that much more clear that Windows Phone is Definitely Dead and that nobody really wants to develop "software" for the Xbox One.
But, I suspect we're going to continue blaming demographics and open source. It doesn't really hurt the platform, but it does make it just a little harder to consider it an exciting place. Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, talked about wanting to make Windows a thing people loved to use – basically in the style of Mac OS. It'll be interesting to see if that happens, and what happens to the platform on the way.