I’ve had the pleasure of using a mac since this past spring and have enjoyed the experience. I can definitely understand why apple users are beyond fanatical. I can safely say that I am not one of them. My thoughts on this are pretty simple: you either have to go all in, or stick to a PC. I live in a “in transit” mode, where I have a mac, and a bunch of pc paraphernelia. I’ve been constantly trying to find ways to make things work on a mac, and they just don’t. Unless I buy an iPod, or live in this artificial utopia, I will constantly be trying to make things work.
If I was using a PC, this would be a non-issue. Apple was smart to cater to the market-dominant operating system with iTunes, and it has paid off (hello, itunes music store?). On a PC, I can make an iPod work with various media players (Winamp, and I’m sure others).. but on a mac, I can’t make an mp3 player work.
I don’t like iWork, and I find myself either being frustrated with MS Office on the mac (being a math guy, the equation editor is where I get cranky first… especially since office 2007 on pc kicks the shit out of office 2008 on a mac). I use NeoOffice because OpenOffice is natively a piece of shit on a mac, and even that is buggy.
I don’t like iPhoto, and miss Picasa. Any machead will say I’m crazy and that I should live in an iPhoto/Aperture universe… but picasa and lightroom is definitely overkill already for me 
I find that I return to my old dell laptop running XP for “mac-friendly” tasks (photos, making music, etc). Perhaps I am the statistical outlier.
Don’t get me wrong — I love this laptop. It’s great, and gets things done for me. I don’t see myself buying a mac once this one lives out its days. I see the next one sporting Ubuntu or SUSE over Vista.. at least that’s how I see it now..