Yes, that is correct. If I remove the ampersand from the password (i.e. insert a password without “&”), the installation finishes correctly.
Could well be that the different character encoding used on Mac and Windows is the underlying issue here. Also I’m based in a Nordic country, not in US, so I’m not sure if there’s even further character encoding differencies between systems to accomodate for our umlauts and whatnot. 
If it’s of any help, here’s what my system says about the character encoding (these are all default Windows installation settings):
IsSingleByte : True
BodyName : iso-8859-1
EncodingName : Western European (Windows)
HeaderName : Windows-1252
WebName : Windows-1252
WindowsCodePage : 1252
IsBrowserDisplay : True
IsBrowserSave : True
IsMailNewsDisplay : True
IsMailNewsSave : True
EncoderFallback : System.Text.InternalEncoderBestFitFallback
DecoderFallback : System.Text.InternalDecoderBestFitFallback
IsReadOnly : True
CodePage : 1252
Hope this gets resolved as I use a password generator to generate unique passwords everywhere and I’d rather not exclude & from the characters in use.