Depends. You can't ignore all the crap they throw onto a store bought PC that MS had nothing to do with. This will bog things down. Macs are totally controlled from start to finish through Apple. So you're getting a clean computer. Short of building your own, a clean reinstall of the OS is a good idea if you get a store bought one. But nowadays you get a recovery disc, not sure how viable that is.
I have an iMac, the last gen one (New ones launched in Feb) and all in all, I'm impressed. It came with 1GB of RAM, and it loaded up faster than any of my PC's did. I had many programs open, I never once noticed a slowdown. I upgraded to 4 (The max) and so no difference in speed. Kind of saying a lot that 1 gig could do all that. This would be impossible with Vista or even XP in my book. Hell, even my broadband speed is much faster. Not even sure such a thing is possible, but dammit I KNOW I'm not imagining it! Maybe the PC I had acted like a bottleneck? I dunno. But it seems memory is alloted a hell of a lot better than any PC I had ever owned. Though I haven't been a PC gamer in ages, and my computer time is pretty much limited to the web. So I haven't tested out what the Mac can handle with any big third party program.
Again, I'm happy with the purchase. Though did I really need to spend this going of money to surf the tubes of the Internet? Eh. But in 6 months, no slowdown, no hangups, no freezing. Although this morning was the first time in a loooong time I decided to reboot to get FireFox to respond (Wouldn't open up) reminded me of my PC days. And I've had a long history of PC days. From top of the line (at the time) store bought and built by me, to cheapo Acer ones that I had to make do with because my last super PC decided to die.
In the end, price I believe is the biggest factor. I got lucky. Newegg was still selling Macs, and I got this one for 1 year, no finance charge. So same as cash. If I didn't get that deal, I would not have plopped down over a thousand at once for a computer.
