In hardware terms, MacBook pro is a great laptop, regardless of what other laptop you compare it to. In software terms, OSX is a great OS and you can use bootcamp/parallels to access windows and various LiveCD's to install the *nixes as well. It's even cost competitive and kept on equal footing with other laptop makers in terms of graphics chipset, firewire chipset, etc.
However I think there are some other points in this thread I could wax on about...
To start with, in pre-OSX MacOS's there was more than just 'simple copy of system folder' to deal with. Mac users made fun of PC users for dealing with hardware conflicts "Mac Just works!" (if it exists at all one should say). But instead of being able to map DMA and IRQ addresses with pencil on a sheet of printer paper and figure out how to keep everything from conflicting you wind up facing the Mac version of driver conflicts: control panel conflicts. Definately took me more than 15 mins to suss this out, as sometimes it would even be certain combinations of control panels and extensions. Ooh 3 yrs later you can save your 2 day long testing session as 'control panel sets' or something (dimly recall the name these days). Basically you're down to hand enabling things and rebooting, and the easiest way to track down combinations was either trial and error or by using a spreadsheet.
Hardware support was nonexistant. PC's from the inception were based around off-the-shelf hardware to break user's reliance on OEM hardware, which in the past had traditionally meant you were stuck buying hardware from the vendor you bought the computer and OS from, and the software development was a closely protected network of companies. There was of course some 3rd party hardware that did have Mac support, but due to architectural differences it still needed to be different hardware if it was an internal device. External devices only needed to be able to talk 'big endian' and 'little endian' from the 3rd party vendor. This is part of where the complexity of Mac networked with Unix came from btw, getting things transferred and in the right byte ordering was not always easy.
Then there's Appletalk, a great bonus for the average home user who needs simple home networking in an era before most PC home users even cared, but in a production environment getting it to work seamless with Windows & NFS shares was a bit of a mixed bag. Accessing the windows shares strictly from the mac side and everything was great, but do things on the windows side and you lost resource forks etc. Blame windows for not properly handling a mac's file structure, but the Mac always went out of its way to deal with a windows world it's surprising. Deal with nfs shares in a Mac environment and things got even worse, and talking to the Mac from the Unix/IRIX/Linux end and you're pretty much down to using ftp access (mac users used to like to call this 'letting you fetch' files). Of course that was 10 yrs ago and now Macs run BSD Unix so things do change.
I could go on here, waxing on about how Apple was so frequently influenced by the elitism of the RISC market it relied on for the core of its hardware, on & on about how most Mac users were comparing their upmarket hardware with a 16bit OS to another 16bit OS on crappy consumer hardware versus comparing themselves to the Xeons or PentiumPro era hardware running on an NT OS. But then again the NT OS had worse support for hardware & software than even Macs did for many many years (I know from personal experience).
Looking at today, I wouldn't consider OSX to be unfriendly but...
While Appletalk is now fully replaced by the BSD networking stack (Which all NT based OS's use as well btw), the hardware support end is still a huge thing. Apple has nicely given Mac users the ability to run most Windows software. But what about PC users who want to run on a Mac? Even now that they're on intel hardware, Mac is still different enough to require specific 'apple blessed' hardware. Take graphics cards for example. A 7300GT is crap for anyone that does anything in 3d, gaming or otherwise. The Ati 1900xt era card is fine if you don't mind sticking with 3dsMax or something that runs on OSX (Maya/Cinema4d etc), and still run 3 yr old games. But if you need a decent Nvidia card for 'proper' opengl drivers in linux & windows (and maybe a quick game of bioshock or crysis) you can choose from a Quadro or nothing. Wait! Even the Quadro is last year's tech?! And you're still paying prices as if it's current gen tech...
The same thing actually applies outside of just graphics card support as well btw. Need a nicer backplane and have to upgrade your external array to SAS? Not everyone wants a Mac server as their primary work machine and lose the internal expansion and PCIe graphics just to have SAS. Even with the popularity of FinalCut Studio among the SOHO set, you're still limited to a very small selection of hardware or firewire (which isn't the same as an SAS raid!). Part of the overall reason here in terms of hardware support is that Apple decided to go with EFI. Most Windows based devices still only need to deal with the BIOS, and *nixes that go for EFI support include some level of BIOS support to at least get devices up & running under EFI. And of course the other end of the stick here is that even devices that should work in theory, even with some effort (flashing a bios loader in place of EFI support at the extreme) you'll still need to dig in by hand and edit system level configuration files. In fact none of this would even be possible for the average user if there wasn't the pirated OSX scene figuring things out. When I ran G3's and G4's people certainly weren't digging that far into the OS so I guess that's a plus.
Of course the biggest issue here I think is that people can get really used to what they know well, and minor differences among platforms can seem like huge glaring issues. As much as I might cry about still not being able to run a single machine for all my tasks (and have it be an Apple blessed xeon box to boot), when you get down to it every OS & hardware platform suffers from bugs and limitations in some cases, and has strengths in other cases.
Back to the Macbook Pro, by anyone's reconing it's excellent when compared to other laptops because every laptop vendor has mostly closed hardware. Aside from swapping ram/hd/cpu (which is all possible with a Macbook Pro) there's usually little else you can upgrade internally. The desktop is still a different story, as Mac Pros are not really much more open.
But still I'd be damn happy with a Macbook Pro myself (my laptop is still a single core centrino!).
) and your basic internet setting, is multi-lingual.
