I have 4 PCs and 3 Macs in my house, and use both, so I do speak from experience.

There are people who simply adore Mac, and will tell you that anything with Apple logo is far superior to anything else on the market. My opinion is is much more temperate.

I think that while Macs work well, and have some nice, polished features, I find the Mac OS not very efficient. For example, for me it is much more intuitive to have the window close button on the top right (like in Windows), than on the top left, like in the Mac). You can resize MS windows by moving any window's border. On the other hand, the only way to resize a Mac window is to grab a little triangular handle area in the lower right corner. This is inconvenient, and if that corner of the window is low enough, the dock will pop up when you move the cursor down, not really letting you get to the resize handle of the window. Of course, those are very minor annoyances.

Overall, Apple hardware is very high-end, fairly nicely designed, and well built. Still, there are more annoying differences which Apple has purposely perpetuating to appease the Mac fanboys and aggravate users like me. It has no forward delete key, so to do a forward delete you need to use both hands - press the FN key in the lower left corner with the left hand, and the backspace key in the upper right corner. There are other keyboard differences, which for me make it much more efficient to type on the PC. I do like the two-finger scrolling of the Mac, which is very convenient. There is only one mouse button on the trackpad (none on the newer Mac computers), but tapping with one or two fingers sufficiently replaces single/double click.

Many people laud Mac's reliability, but in my experience it crashes nearly as often as a Windows machine. Apple tech-support is very user-friendly, if a bit condescending, but beyond the first year, you have to pay several hundred $$ to have it extended to 3 years. With my experience, it was well worth it - I have had 2 hard drive crashes, a faulty battery, and a slew of other failures that required a call to tech support. So if you go for a Mac, make sure to back up your machine regularly (thankfully made easy with the Time Machine backup mechanism, which is a part of the operating system).

As far as software goes, there are simple applications that are built in. IChat is an excellent appllication, but I find that I use Skype more. iCal (Calendar) and Address Book are so-so, and are incompatible with the MS Outlook. Some people find them adequate, but if you are used to Outlook, you may not like them at all (I sure don't). In fact, while you can spend the money and buy MS Office for Mac, their organizer version, Entourage, is also unable to share data with MS Outlook (I did not try going through Exchange, but most private users do not use it anyways). I couldn't find a karaoke player for the Mac (like Van Basco for the PC). There are many software titles that are available only for the PC, and not for Mac, but for most common tasks you can find equivalent apps running on the Mac platform. Even if you don't, all modern Macs (with Intel processors) have ability to run Windows software, using two different ways - BootCamp (allowing you to select booting into the Mac or Windows OS when starting up), or using a Windows emulator (VMware Fusion, or Parallels). I use VMWare, and it works well; still, it is annoying to have to switch between the OSes. You will need to have a valid Windows license (plus the ones for the appropriate applications) for using either BootCamp or Windows emulators. For all serious work I use Windows applications (I have Office in both Windows and Mac, but almost never use the latter). I don't use much audio or video editing, but my overall feeling is that I could have saved $1000 by buying a mid- or high-end Windows laptop.

Hope this helps,
Alex