Apple push technological design forward in nearly every area they enter, this has always been the case, right back to the Mac II.
However, since they changed to the Intel platform, anybody who knows about hardware, knows that when they buy an Apple product, they are paying for the nice case and good build quality.
These things are fine, but as in the past when Sony laptops were the ones to have, I personally cannot justify the extra cost.
Macbooks are lovely things, from their genuine 5 hour battery life, to the nice keyboard, excellent screen etc, but somebody in this thread stated their MBP cost them £1600 AFTER discount.
my Dell XPS M1730 with SLI graphics, excellent screen, RAID hard drives, (at the time) top dual core CPU, 4GB RAM, blueray etc etc cost £1600 direct from Dell, with no discounts to speak of. Ok its ugly as sin, is about as portable as a bag of bricks and its battery life is an hour, but it was bought as a desktop replacement that ocasionally will travel from my office desk to conferences etc. I don't know the spec of the MBP, but i'd warrant it isnt anywhere near. As somebody who knows what hardware is, macs are just too expensive.
With re: to the OS, personally i cant get on with OSX, but i recognise its a good environment, but tbh you can run windows or OSX on an apple, and you can run OSX and windows on a non apple PC, so really, thats a non deciding factor for me.