If we can glean any meaning from the buying habits of the tech-savvy population of Japan, it would be that Mac users are far more likely to buy an OS upgrade for their computers than Windows users.

Although largely caused by the spike in sales generated by Leopard’s launch, the new version of Mac OS X beat Microsoft’s Vista in the packaged operating system category (that is, they bought the OS in a box rather than pre-installed on a computer) in Japan for the month of October.

Leopard snapped up 53.9 percent of the market according to BCN, a Japanese language consumer electronics news and data services company. Although Vista is not as fresh, having been on sale since the beginning of the year, Leopard had only the last six days of the month to accomplish its feat.

It gets better. Combined with sales of Tiger (people are still buying Tiger?) Apple took 60.7 percent of the market. That’s a huge leap from September, when Apple had only a 15.5 percent share.

So far in November, Leopard is beating its nearest competitor 40.2 percent to 10.5 percent. And that competitor is not Windows Vista – it’s the three-year-old Windows XP SP2 Home Edition.