To stay in Russell’s picture, although there may be less diversity on the Mac side of the world, life there is definitely easier. I just had to install a Mac and a PC. Both computers had to replace older models and the task at hand was to migrate all programs, data and stuff from the older to the newer computer.

The Mac beat the PC hands down. Using the migration assistant I was able to have the new Mac up and running in 30 minutes after the copy process was complete. I just followed the suggested steps after the first boot of the new iMAC G5.
On the PC side it took me several hours (say, 2 to 3) plus my expertise to get the data plus a reasonable amount of software (by far not everything) moved to the new machine. And that was only stuff from one of the 2 PC accounts on that Windows machine.
Subsequently, the Mac had all email accounts, printer settings, network settings etc. ready to go. The PC of course did find available printers but of course network settings and email had to bet set up manually. Yes, I do know that Dell has something similar to Apple’s migration assistant in its portfolio when you configure your PC. But I’m not quite sure how that software performs when moving data from a Windows XP Home machine from Medion to a brand new MT 380 workstation. I’ve made to many bad experiences to do these stunts…
While it is true that there is definitely more software available for the PC – for most of the business-type John Does out there this is absolutely of no significance. They use a browser, some office software and that’s it. Of course there are markets where every supplier does provide Windows-only software. But even this software isn’t needed on every computer in a company. And my recent experiences show that a mixed environment does not automatically increase administration cost. More likely, Macs just sit there and work. PCs will cause more trouble, more fiddling around, more maintenance. Which is OK for expert users but not for non-geeks.

So, all thoughts about UI wackinesses and specific software flaws set aside: The end-to-end solutions Apple provides are not only superior, they are also sufficiently compatible to the rest of the world. It’s a sad aside that in my opinion not more than 5 percent of all computer users really need a Windows PC because of the wider range of software available while actually 95% percent are using it.