Ebert commented in his review that the film was unique in that it just showed OSX and standard programs like mail.app and iphoto instead of having everything be obviously faked. I like that approach but for whatever reason it is pretty rare in films.
I've always wondered why films and TV series (with limited budgets) don't just use off-the-shelf screens from Windows, OS X, or Linux distros. Are there some copyright/trademark issues that get in the way? It seems like a lot of work to develop your own UI that will only be on the screen for a few seconds.
I did notice that in an episode of Homeland that Saul was runing Media Player Classic on Windows to watch a video from an SD card, with the titlebar blurred out (so the name of the app wasn't visible). Later, another character watches the same video but there's a total custom UI used to bring up the video. In the same episode.
Personally I get annoyed whenever I see product placements, like Macbooks, or iPhones, or Windows screens in movies, not to mention Google/Bing searches or Xbox/Playstations in futuristic settings.
Especially when I go to a movie theater, I go there to watch a movie that I pay for. I'm not paying between $7 and $20 to watch a commercial.
Actually, it's highly unrealistic to see everyone using the exact same platform or exact same software. Especially the Apple products, as their perception of ubiquity is highly inflated by their advertising.
In The Matrix Reloaded, Trinity uses nmap and then an OpenSSH exploit that was published a couple months before the film officially opened in theaters. Contrast this with Swordfish, where you get lines like (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "We have a DS3, allowing you to access eight systems simultaneously." Ugh, just hit stop and go outside.
Back on topic, Tron: Legacy to me feels like a highly technological father/son movie, in the same way that Google is a highly technological advertising company. So it seems we're already living in the future. "The Matrix has you..."
I did notice that in an episode of Homeland that Saul was runing Media Player Classic on Windows to watch a video from an SD card, with the titlebar blurred out (so the name of the app wasn't visible). Later, another character watches the same video but there's a total custom UI used to bring up the video. In the same episode.