I actually hit this hard a few months ago while trying to turn my laptop into a hackintosh. It would only boot once every 3 tries. And ultimately there's nothing special about the OS. I missed my apt & kde4

I would dispute that... except that I suspect that it might be much more true if you're foolish enough to go the Hackintosh route.

The whole point of the Mac OS is that everybody is using more or less the same thing: similar OS, similar software, similar hardware, similar drivers. That makes it fairly easy to adopt tips and techniques from the community, or to Google for applicable advice, and it makes the user experience smoother and simpler. Once you throw away much of the ease of installation and maintenance, the consistency, and the stability the Mac OS is not that much more than Unix with pretty windows and a stricter set of UI guidelines -- and there are plenty of ways to prettify your Linux windows!

You do get access to well-designed, closed-source, Mac-only apps. (The open source Mac apps can generally be cross-compiled for Linux, or more likely vice versa.) But if you're too cheap to buy actual Mac hardware you're less likely to care about the power to pay for nicely designed Mac apps. Especially when some of those apps might exhibit mysterious bugs on your hackintosh hardware.

Just spend those hours you'd waste trying to maintain a hackintosh learning more about Linux. It's a better use of your time. Or buy a real Mac like everybody else.

Oh, I don't know anything about Unix, but you might want to keep a few of those if you want to keep up with Ubuntu.

You do get access to well-designed, closed-source, Mac-only apps.

If I used windows, I'd also get the privilege of paying for lots of well-designed closed-source windows-only apps.