highclimber, how much time have you spent on a mac? you sound like the standard anti mac pc lover. The hype around macs is bollocks, but they work, the software and hardware work together fine. The number of PCs you see that come with limited software or missing software is impressive, they may be cheap but you then land up forking out extra. Buy a mac you get what you need, you don't need to know about free alternatives, or having to buy extra software.
In the end like for like macs aren't really any more expensive than a pc, it is just you can buy cheap and nasty pcs.
The only thing that does annoy is that there is no OS based mapping program for macs, but i guess the same applies to Linux, Solaris, etc, etc,