Not sure they'd be worth the large price difference, but there's some physical differences, like the unibody aluminum shell versus a plastic shell, and the Inspiron being 30% thicker at the thickest point.

That Dell would make a sweet Hackintosh too. Looks like it can run Snow Leopard just fine.

If you really compare and read both specs/offers you'll see the following;

0. with the apple price you also buy esthetics. Not a real point for most anti apple guys. But i care if i use the device daily and talk to customers.

1. Please add $139.99 to the price for the upgrade from windows 7 home to ultimate. (Ultimate is the closest to the variant free Mac OS X) You could also add some $ for the iLife packages you get with the $1999 price.

2. dell screen should be (reading their own spec) 1280×720 versus MBP 1440x900 resolution.

3. dell CPU = 2.26 GHz vs MBP CPU = 2.53GHz

4. wireless-G on the dell vs wireless-N on the apple.

5. gigabit NIC for the apple vs 100mbit nic on the dell.

6. FW800 on the apple, AFAIK not on the dell.

7. shouldn't you add shipping costs for the dell?

As others already said:

8. aluminium casing vs plastic is a real difference if you compare them in reality. But not everybody cares the same way about this fact.

9. size between devices.

10. backlit keyboard and multitouch trackpad on the apple and not on the dell. I know that this is not important for a lot of people so that's why it's stated last.

But the dell wins on video card memory!

There's your answer.

My point is that even if the Dell isn't an exact match feature for feature, I can get 2.5 of them for the same price as one Macbook Pro.

But just for fun, I picked a different Dell laptop, with a quad core i7, 1920x1080 15.6" screen, wireless N + WiMAX card, Windows 7 Ultimate, and it's still only $1584.