I am looking for a totally unbiased answer here. I want to know if Mac's are faster than PC's with the same specs. I tried to find some decent comparisons but all I found was people comparing brand new Mac's to old PC's with a shitload of bloatware. So is there any actual answer on which OS is faster?

No

My Mac boots up faster when turning on.. much faster than any other laptop I've ever seen. It also runs way faster than my mom's fairly new Dell laptop (she has Vista).

maybe make it the same price instead of specs then we'll compare the specs.

This is what I'm talking about, Dells are loaded with crap and bloatware. Plus it's probably running a bad Anti-Virus which is a probably memory hog. So not a fair comparison.

no

its a matter of whats on each OS. Mac can be a touch faster mattering what your doing. Image editing for some reason is always faster on a Mac. I've even used a PC with an Intel i7 975 vs a Core 2 Quad in a Mac and the Mac loaded Adobe and effects faster.

Faster at what?

The answer is probably no. Back when Macs used the PPC architecture, they had a distinct advantage in certain kinds of processing, like AV work. Nowadays Macs are held back by in a lot of areas by poorly optimized APIs. Flash is a good example, it runs way slower than it should on a Mac. Adobe just doesn't put much effort into the Mac version.

If a Mac is beating a PC, it's probably because the PC is bogged down by spyware or because it doesn't have enough resources to support Vista bloat.

MAC is indeed faster on boot , its cause Vista is filled with unneeded stuff once it starts, and some Antivirus programs like mcafee are a pretty heavy load on your PC.
its better to delete alot of these things before you download anything, once you do i think its a little bit like the same speed.
Ubuntu being the fastest (in my experience)

Say I get a new hard drive and do a fresh install of...Windows 7 (for example..) Will it boot just as fast or faster? :P