Honestly, I picked my poison in 2010 or so: MacOS. You're right that it does have Apple services baked in, and that it is limited to Apple's hardware.
To the former: I never use them and they literally never push themselves on me.
To the latter: Apple's hardware is far and away the most pleasant to use. Every windows machine I've used in the last decade (bought an XPS 13 in 2019 out of necessity) is just wonky. Feels less polished on the hardware side, and fighting with drivers and bloatware is not what I want to deal with. Like, does a laptop really need some stupid, custom audio interface to be able to control whether I'm using a headphone jack or built-in speakers? On the XPS, you do. It's absurd.
I mean Apple put a whole stupid ARM chip in my laptop to interface with the keyboard and trackpad (among other things). This has the "fun" benefit of essentially killing support for non-blessed OSs because who wants to use a laptop that doesn't have a functional built-in keyboard and mouse? Oh and I've even had Bridge OS crash a few times knocking out the keyboard and mouse in macOS forcing me to restart.
To the former: I never use them and they literally never push themselves on me.
To the latter: Apple's hardware is far and away the most pleasant to use. Every windows machine I've used in the last decade (bought an XPS 13 in 2019 out of necessity) is just wonky. Feels less polished on the hardware side, and fighting with drivers and bloatware is not what I want to deal with. Like, does a laptop really need some stupid, custom audio interface to be able to control whether I'm using a headphone jack or built-in speakers? On the XPS, you do. It's absurd.