I absolutely love my Mac Pro. I triple boot OS X, Vista Business X64, and Kubuntu Feisty, and spend 98% of my time on OS X. Some of you might call it the "Apple Way" but I always have tons of things open at any one time spanned across 2 x 19" widescreen LCDs, and I love being able to switch between applications with the dock, and I have trouble working without the unified menubar at the top of the screen. On top of that, Expose is great(much better than that Vista flip thing).
On hardware price... for what I paid, the Mac Pro was a a great deal. Go to Newegg.com and price out 2 x Xeon 5150s and an Intel 5000x motherboard. That already gets you to ~$1800(when I got it, the motherboards were $200 more which would have brought the price of those components up to $2000) for $500 more($2300 total from Amazon), I got a WD Caviar 250 GB HDD, 2x512MB DDR2 FB-Dimms(fully buffered server memory), an optical drive, a kilowatt power supply, an awesome fully aluminum case that allows EXTREMELY easy hard drive/pcie-card/RAM/optical drive upgrades, and an OS X license. The case has four trays for hard drives that you just screw the drive into and slide in, and 2 more SATA ports on the motherboard for either future optical drives(Blu Ray and HD DVD often use SATA instead of IDE), or two more hard drives if you can find a place for them.
I can see why people say Apple hardware sucks... I only have two dual core Xeons and 3 GB RAM.
I'm not a huge gamer, but I do occasionally play games, and that is what Vista is there for. True, Vista is a bit of a hog, and the graphics card drivers aren't quite up to par yet, but I think some of you are being a bit harsh. I'm mainly a Mac user, and I feel this way. It's about damn time Microsoft actually renders the desktop(OSX has Quartz, and Linux has Beryl). I hated how every earlier Microsoft OS had graphical trouble with movement of windows. I haven't had Vista totally crap out on me yet, although stuff still does become unresponsive some times, and the task manager "end task" button is still essentially useless. Stuff doesn't crash as often as it did in XP, as long as you are smart and use malware scanners, you shouldn't have security problems. And about security and the whole "sandbox" thing. All they did was fix a leaky boat by placing it into another leaky boat. They need to fix the underlying security issues, and that is how applications interact with the OS sandbox or no sandbox. Me thinks the MS devs should look into the *NIX book.
The one thing Windows does that OSX should is include remote desktop software with the OS. I know how to use SSH which is built into OSX, but I always need to hope Cygwin is installed on the machine I'm using to access my own.
My Vista hardware scores:
5.9 Processors
5.9 RAM
5.4 Hard Drive
4.3 Aero(Due to the 7300 GT)
4.3 Games(Due to the 7300 GT)
And onto Kubuntu... I don't know how anybody can use Gnome. It is completely crippled and counter-intuitive, and I totally agree with Linus's stance. I hate how the applications are across the top of the screen. KDE + kickoff(a must!) + beryl however makes a pretty neat setup. The debian package manager is awesome. All the software you need for day to day stuff is right there! I got pretty sick of having to wait for portage to calculate dependencies in the gentoo based distros I've used. GNU/Linux is maturing pretty fast, and I have high hopes for it. I wouldn't be surprised if 5 years down the line I found good reason to switch from OS X to Linux.
Edit: Did I mention this beast is almost
silent
