I think any religion about this stuff is wrong. An objective person looks at the full spectrum as I did.
The current PC market is screwed up though when it comes to laptops (desktops we can build ourselves so no issues at all there and that ability blows away any offering from Apple). When the market for the consumer laptops started to shrink, the manufacturers all tried to go up market. They figured if they raised the prices, it would make up for lower quantity. This happened at the same time as Windows 8 which made for a toxic combination. When I was at Microsoft, we always had a tug-o-war with PC OEMs. It was a rare situation to see them build the right system. They have thin or no margin, with not the best in the world in charge of marketing, branding and such. This is OK if you are looking for any computer. If you are picky like me though (and the writer) and can see through the mismatches, it doesn't work as well.
BTW, I went back and repaired the case for my Vaio Z laptop instead of buying something new. Despite being a few years old, it was superior to anything I could buy. One crazy example was that I needed 8 Gigabytes of RAM and laptops that I found like Samsung that were perfect for me, had a max of 4 Gigabytes and no ability to expand because they followed Apple's lead and soldered the memory to the main board as opposed to a card which I upgraded in my Sony to 8 gig. I am hoping that once they upgrade to Haswell Intel processor they up the memory.
Another issue for Windows and Intel is power consumption. Apple is razor focused on this and has built a wide gap with Windows. Today's web pages are massive power hugs. Flash animations run everywhere on pages and suck up CPU and hence, additional power (and heat). Apple has been on a path to optimize Safari for example to not render these hidden elements when they are not in view. Their experience with iPad and iPhone is spilling into their desktop design. Microsoft with its very long cycles with respect to core OS changes and massive compatibility testing is clearly behind here. Putting Windows on the same Mac hardware robs you of 20% of your battery consumption.
