I used a macbook as my only computer for about 6 months when I started medical school and was less than enamored with it. These points won't apply to everyone but I call it as I see it.
1) Needed to use MS Access for my research project. Not avialable on Mac, bummer.
2) Liked Outlook much better than separate iCal, Mail, etc. Also missed the seamless synchronization between my phone, our exchange server, and outlook.
3) No right click button on my laptop! Yeah you don't use it as often as you do in Windows but saving ppt's for class etc I needed to use "download linked file as" a lot because I always wanted the file immediately stuck in the folder of my choice, not on my desktop. I hated having to do command click, what would be so bad about adding a button?
4) Safari incompatibility weirdness, ex no google chat on the gmail page (since rectified). Wasn't crazy about Firefox either.
5) One iTunes update completely and utterly froze the computer upon relaunching iTunes. Had to uninstall the program and reinstall a new copy. According to Apple, that happens sometimes with iTunes updates.
6) Powerpoint in Office 2004 was painfully slow trying to open the huge powerpoints my lecturers would post. Although the ones who created their powerpoints using a mac would sometimes contain images that would not display properly in the windows version. By having the mac I could see what I would have been missing. I haven't tried Office 2008 so I can't coment on any speed improvement with native powerpoint.
7) I hated the little green resize button. With only a 13" screen there were many occassions I would want excel, etc to take up the whole screen. Sadly I would have to manually resize it, which can only be done from one corner of the screen. That functionality is not intuitive to me. Why should the program decide how big the window should be?
I've been using a Vista desktop for a year (use the mac when I need portability) and no freezes, crashes, error messages etc on my windows machine. Counting the iTunes problems and one hard drive failure my macbook had, my windows record is so far pretty good.
Many people won't find the same things as irritating. And there were some things I liked. Using Bonjour was really easy to set up a networked printer. In windows I had to type in IP settings etc, none of that with the mac. Best of luck with the new purchase, hope it all works out for you.
