>It doesn't require as much maintenance as Linux.

What maintenance does Linux require? The only thing I can think you might be implying is that there are bugs caused by updating that cause system issues frequently and this is simply untrue. Software updates have been known to cause issues on all systems, and I can find plenty of results on google showing OS X having issues after updates. Linux, in my experience, is the "set it and forget it" operating system. OS X is great though, just not for everyone (personally the environment doesn't have the capabilities I look for in an OS).

I get scared everytime I do an apt-get update because I've had it break my Linux box more than once, sometimes horribly (especially when doing a dist-upgrade to get a new kernel).

It's even worse when the Nvidia drivers don't automatically recompile for the new kernel. I've had many upgrade that resulted in no functional X-Window session so I had to use the terminal to download and recompile the video drivers.

I realize that's a problem with binary blobs rather than open source drivers, but it's also a reality.

I had that fear under Ubuntu because a new dist upgrade is usually especially unstable. Now that I use Arch I don't fear upgrades. I do perform them fairly often though, because massive upgrades in general can be problematic.

Distributions have improved their NVIDIA packages to such a degree that I haven't encountered problems with driver upgrades in many years, across several distributions.