I posted that at an Apple store when I went to go play with one.
To be honest, I'll never stop using Windows. Windows is where my productivity work will always be done, and Windows is where my gaming will always be done.
However, for a laptop, I find the 15" Powerbook quite appealing. Keep in mind the types of usage that a laptop gets when compared to a desktop. IMO, buying a Mac desktop is just plain stupid. When I was using the G5 I was horrified by the load speed. My AthlonXP 2.1ghz w/ 512MB of RAM and a PATA (IBM Desktar) HDD destroy a dual G5 w/ 1.5gb of RAM when it comes to loading Photoshop. Having never used a G5 before, I found its overall sluggishness in loading applications appalling. This is especially true when you see the very slight performance difference from the G4 laptops I used. One would expect a huge performance gap between a 1ghz G4 w/ 512MB of RAM and a dual 2ghz G5 w/ 1.5GB of RAM, but it was miniscule. About 2 seconds to be exact.
So, will I be getting a Powerbook? Probably. They are nice laptops, and OSX is nice for many reasons, namely I like the interface (for using, not for working, I still prefer Windows there), its Unix base means I can actually learn some Unix w/o having to waste a whole computer (I hate dual booting machines, I did it for far too long in the 98/2K days, so I refuse to now.) just to play with it so I can get basic knowledge, I can say I know Mac (which is good if I ever want to get a job in NYC at a design firm of some sort) and plus the Powerbook is w/o a doubt the best built laptop I've ever seen. If only Sony or Toshiba could put out a machine like that... the G4 processor aside of course.
So yeah. Mac desktops? Gimme a break. Mac laptops? Hey, maybe. It seems I'm not alone on this one tho. Powerbooks and iBooks have about 9% of the laptop market share, vs the ~ 1% of desktop market share. These combined give Apple its overall 2-3% computer market share that they quote. W/o the Powerbooks, that # would be a joke.
As for computer novices and Apples... I can see where they think that Apples are easier to use. I think that's primary because there are more normal-people applications built by Apple that are automatically installed when compared to Windows where Microsoft does very few normal-people applications and lets the small companies do their thing while they focus on enterprise level and productivity applications.
For actual usability, I agree that it's a NICER interface, but I wouldn't say it's easier. I find it partially counter-intuitive on some levels (Panther's Finder, for example) when compared to the Start menu. But I think overall is that Windows has a horrific array of options (especially XP) which overwhelm novices. Apple completely lacks these options (they exist usually, but are not as easily available as a part of the 'standard' options window) and so people consider the OS 'easier'. It's a matter of perspective really. Those of us who are power users would of course rather have those options easily availble, which Windows does exceedingly well in an organized manner. Apple has a general rule that most options should be available within 3 clicks. The way Windows organizes stuff so deep due to volume of options would probably make that an impossible dream or an even more cluttered Control Panel.
Is Windows an eyesore? I'd say yes, when you compare to OSX. But is an OS supposed to be pretty or useful? Can you do both? I would say that OSX, on the whole, is better at doing both from a PLATFORM standpoint. It's very powerful (when compared to OS9 and below) in relation to Windows and it's pretty. Windows XP is very powerful, pretty damn stable and, once you get the hang of it, very simple to use... but it's ass ugly. Longhorn will probably fix a lot of that ugly issue as well as adding a layer of user-friendly options on top of the standard array of endless choices we currently see in XP.
Now, if I could build a system and run OSX on it, which OS would I pick? I'd actually have a pretty hard time with that, but would probably pick Windows at the end of the day just because of its code writing capabilities. Whilst xcode is nice for deving OSX software and WebObjects is nice for proprietary OSX web applications, Visual Studio.NET gives you ASP.NET w/ C# and the rest of the standards (MS or cross-platform) that work extremely well. Apple has Java... which is great, but slow and requires a great deal of server hardware to run, not to mention iffy support for small business applications. The Java vs. ASP.NET argument at the enterprise level argument could go on forever, so I won't discuss it here, except that I prefer ASP.NET due to my own background in ASP (despite the fact that ASP.NET is almost completely different, hehe).
So there you go. I don't like anyone who's a zealot on either side, both have their pros and cons, so that's why I intend on using both's strengths as I can: OSX for my laptop, Windows for my desktop.