Doesn't negate my original argument - both push out updates and do so a 'regular' basis. And number of updates is irrelevant. If MS pushed out ten small updates and Apple one large one, would you say that Apple has patched less? Probably not. If that were the case, one could make the argument that the glacial update progress of Safari would signify that it is leagues ahead of every other browser in terms of security which is contestable at best (I'm not saying that it's insecure but rather that it's not many times more secure).
If we do go by update count, pushing out more can be a sign of vigilance as much as it can incompetence. Publishing more updates for a products doesn't signify that a product is inherently more insecure than other products.
Let's also not forget that Apple has a record of delaying updates which could be easily solved by more regular updates. In 2008 for instance, OS X had a critical DNS related bug and nearly three months later, it was still unpatched (
source). In 2009, a security related bug was found in Java which was patched by Sun in Dec. of 2008. As of May of 2009 (nearly six months later), it was still unpatched by Apple (
source). In 2003 (an old example but still illustrative of my point), a researcher found a flaw that went unpatched by Apple for at least two months (
source).
This article perhaps sums all of this up nicely (emphasis added):
Apple has a poor history here, often failing to provide OS X security fixes for flaws fixed on other platforms days, weeks, or even months earlier. We’ve seen Mac users exposed to known vulnerabilities in WebKit (Safari), Samba (Windows file sharing), DNS (networking), MDNS (Bonjour), Apache (web server), Java, and more. This is an extremely serious problem, and one Apple is rightly criticized for.
My issue here is not the lack of promptness on Apple's part or a supposed poor quality of security (which I don't believe) but rather to suggest that OS X could benefit from more regular updates. Having things unpatched for so long could be solved by more frequent and smaller updates instead of rolling everything into larger and more infrequent ones. Therefore, MS getting "routine security patches" is, I would argue, a good thing.