To be fair, a 500 dollar dell is not going to be the same quality of hardware as a macbook. Where apple really dings you, however, is the high end. As far as I know, apple hasn’t released a core i7 system. Additionally, windows has A) a huge library of software going back twenty years (compared to OSX’s three, four at the most), B) real gaming support (mostly microsoft’s fault, but still), and C) I can install windows on whatever the fuck hardware I want. OSX I legally am not allowed to do that.
As to the virus issue, OSX is only mostly virus free because of its comparatively small market share. As that market share increases, more of the people who develop viruses will turn to developing them for OSX. Contrary to what apple may want you to think, OSX is no more secure than windows is. Additionally, anti-virus companies have a huge amount of experience combating windows viruses, and almost none combating OSX viruses, so when the time comes that it is popular to write OSX viruses, who do you think will be on top then?
Also: the leading anti-virus software on the market, both Kaspersky anti-virus and (my personal favorite) eset nod32, have a 90% plus detection rate. I’ll stick with windows.
And before some wiseass says that OSX has been around ten years, yes it has, however when apple switched from powerpc to intel, that rendered most of its previous software obsolete and incompatible.
(This is completely unedited from a facebook comment I made, I may edit for better blog-reading later. As it is, enjoy.)