I like skeuomorphism but the windows look has always put me off.

I would say the pinnacle of the skeumorphism era in term of desktop aesthetics and behavior was QNX photon microgui:

Give me that with dpi scaling capabilities and modern font rendering and I will be happy:

http://nixon-development.com/guis/qnx/mediaplayer.png

http://nixon-development.com/guis/qnx/apps.png

With BeOS 5 in close second and MacOS 9 in third.

The windows 9x/2000/XP were all ugly in comparison.