Yep, religion and marketing spin make the mac appealing to many. My wife had an imac until recently, and i've had experience with both apple and intel based products since the first shipped chips and products.
Until XP, i'd have agreed that OSX was superior to a windows offering. I honestly dont see anything in OSX that makes it easier to use, more intuitive or a 'better' product. Granted there are some sillies to XP like clicking on 'start' to stop the machine. Music, movies, photos and so forth work pretty well on XP, and thats the stuff that caused us to buy the imac in the first place.
When I first opened the imac to "look around" the materials, I was surprised to find fairly pedestrian components. A soft modem, plain old maxtor 5400rpm hard drive, nothing really exotic or exciting. Considering we paid $1200 for the imac when a similarly powered and featured PC could be had for half that, I felt a little bit gyped.
The wife did like it, it sure was pretty and she got to buy color matching mice, printers and other such items and that pleased her.
Is OSX more stable than XP? Not in my experience. I found that I installed more crap on XP, and the more junk I put on it, the worse it got. The junk was often simply not available to run on the mac. Any OS analysis I ever saw showed deteriorating stability as you add drivers and applications. Any analysis of installed product on OSX vs a windows machine showed fewer drivers (and often apple branded) and fewer apps (also apple branded). Sort of makes sense that there would be a preponderance of anecdotal evidence that the mac was more stable and had fewer problems.
When I did have problems with the imac, it turned out to be a challenge to figure out what was causing the problem as a lot of the inner workings are hidden. As Jerry Pournelle once said, things with a mac either work immediately and easily, or you're in for a long night.
I put a bunch of software on the mac. It crashed and froze as often as the XP machine we have. The maxtor drive started whining badly after a year and a half due to the passive ventilation in the imac not keeping the disk cool enough. After replacing the maxtor with a quieter seagate, it too started whining about 18 months later. The modem connect speeds werent as good as the hardware modem we used on the PC.
I think the real answer is this: if you like styling and are willing to pay a premium for it, you and your friends/coworkers/etc predominately use macs, and all the apps you want to use work on a mac, thats a good way to go. If you are considering a mac because you think the hardware is 'better' or because the operating system is more robust, or because the apps are easier to use...you'll be disappointed.
