OK, Explain This to me...

[cyberdork33]

back in the day when they had proprietary hardware they could have been arguably better now there just intel pc's

They were always PC's... they just used a different CPU architecture. One that other non-Macs also used.

[fbugnon]

I've been running OSX and Ubuntu on my MacBook Pro-1,1 for a while and (for many reasons) I wish I could use Ubuntu more often, but I still haven't figure it out a way to make the touchpad work as precisely as it does in OSX and I still haven't took the time to reconfigure it (set up users and a shared /home HFS partition with the same UUID) in order to open and modify all my documents from wherever I boot.

Hardware-wise, I'm very happy with my almost 4 years-old Mac. I've added a bit of ram and changed the HD to get more space, but never used the 3-year Apple-care plan that came with it (school-package), even though I carry it every day from home to work.

As personal-case mention only: -my sister has a Lenovo-laptop (2 years-old) that had the keyboard replaced under warranty and CD drive that broke after it was over; -my father has a Gateway-laptop (1,5 year-old) with a broken Ethernet card/connector that forces a reboot on every shutdown request, I can tell you how happy he is. . Aggravating factor to be considered: they rarely use their computer as laptops but rather as fixed-location Desktops...