Around 2005 I tried switching to Ubuntu Desktop, then Mint, then Fedora, then... but Jesus was that painful. The worst and last straw was when I went to Walmart corporate HQ as a consultant and the Linux drivers refused to allow me to Auth to their wifi due to whatever handshake problems they were having. Switching over to Windows- it just worked.
As soon as Mac switched to the Intel processors and the laptop bodies that didn't look like toys, I gave OS X a shot on a Hackintosh, then went out and bought my first MBP. I've NEVER looked back. When I have to do things in Windows (like use Visual Studio to write .NET) it just HURTS.
I also forget the link (maybe it was a consumer reports?) but they said the highest rated Windows laptop you could buy was a MacBook Pro- and had been for four straight years.
You do pay a brand tax when you buy one, but they really are consistently good pieces of hardware- certainly by mainstream manufacturer standards (Dell, HP, etc).
Long story short:
- Handsome aluminum body cases (completely my opinion)
- Linux like command line
- Good shell/command line support
- Decent GUI
- Decent stability and performance of the OS
- Good to really good hardware
- Windows support if you need it via Bootcamp/Parallels
- Retina displays
- The trackpad is f%#£ing magical
At least you CAN get a productive environment. The OSX window manager really really sucks and you can not configure much. Why do not Apple add X11 manager support ?
The Linux distros, for all their good, requires too much handholding and prodding to get a productive desktop development environment working. Windows, too, requires too much handholding, and you're liable to just use a VM for development.