Having used Mac OS X and Vista on a daily basis do to my job, I would say if you want a stable well designed computer, go with Apple. Here's a scenerio that most people will deal with on any windows OS. I have a camcorder, that I frequently edit with, it's a standard firewire device that both windows and OS X have drivers built in for. I plug it into my mac, turn it on, and blam it just works, no pop ups, no wizards. Do the same with exact same device on Vista. I get 4 or 5 popups to install drivers, even though the drivers are actually there, I've now taken time away from the device. Now hook the device up on a different port on the firewire bus, same thing happens again on Vista, you would think that wouldn't be the case if you had just installed the drivers. Apple also has a very powerful work station namely the Mac Pro which comes with 1 or 2 Dual Core 64bit (Woodcrest) Xeon Processors (these are the server class processors) and you have options for upto 4 PCI-Express video cards, dual link support. 16 GB or memory, it depends on how much you want to spend and how you configure it. This is in a tower case, so it's pretty configurable. I have a Mac Book, it's the first laptop I've owned that I don't have trouble typing on the keyboard, it's very comfortable to use, and the built in touch pad is very usefull also. The thing abou OS X is that it's very easy to use for a novice, and pretty powerful for an expert since it's based on BSD (Another unix varrient). The interface is well thought out, which is why they get coppied.
