Ive got a lenovo now, and I got to say, its a pretty nice machine. Very solidly built and runs cool and quiet. After a bit of work with my init scripts, its booting slackware in just under 12 seconds. Windows 7 takes 23 seconds. And idling in Slack uses ~330mb of ram total, while Win7 takes up ~1.95gb. The extra resources required to run wine for steam and photoshop put Slack typically working at around 33%cpu and .9-1.5gb ram, but doing the same things in Windows maxes out everything and gets laggy. Plus, I really hate how in windows, you either have to buy or 'borrow' software for pretty much any basic task. I got so used to just having good apps in linux, I was in no way prepared for how much money in post-install software id have to drop. Really, the only value in Windows is in the third-party software written for it. The OS itself is a piece of poo poo.

OS X I have no issue with. I've never used it extensively, but I do like that its still got the UNIX core at its heart, and that you can install X11 on top of it as well as pretty much anything that will build on a POSIX-compliant system. Plus, its got UNIX at its heart, so stuff like ssh is a part of its system. I like it when my OS has a terminal that can actually DO something, not just file operations.