Thanks Macster. That helps; the OS-X certainly provides all the grunt this humble user needs for his basic tasks, so perhaps it might be worth holding off till the iBook G4 replacement is announced so I can pick up an iBook at a discount. Who knows?
For what it's worth, if anybody is reading this still pondering if, when or why they should change to a Mac, these are my initial thoughts after a couple of months.
I don't just like the Mac, I love it, BUT.... a lot of the buts concern compatibility with Windows. What a shame Mac wasn't adopted as the standard all those years ago. Don't assume that sharing a network with a PC will be the piece of cake some will tell you it is.
It's difficult to describe what sets it apart and makes it so likeable, but general useability would be the generic phrase. I love the Dock, love the clarity of the display, love how things just seem to work with a minimum of fuss.
I'm not so keen, as mentioned earlier in the thread, about brilliant pieces of kit like the iSight and iChat being unusable with Windows users (everybody on my list) without their or my having to download some crappy piece of software to make it work. I'm also appalled that after paying a massive premium over PC prices, you are then asked to pay an annual subscription to join something called .Mac which promises you all sorts of things which I could have sworn the original software promised to provide. I don't know what it does provide, because I refused to even consider it. I should also apparently pay yet another few hundred bucks for a BaseStation or something similar which will finally make all my networking problems go away. And finally, though I suspect this may be a local thing, I'm well short of being impressed with the after sales service.
I haven't put to use the applications people rave about; iDVD, iMovie, Garage band etc, so I suppose it could be said that I'm one of those who should have stuck with an el cheapo PC and kept installing forever my trusty Office 97 copy.
But whatever it is, there's something about the Mac I really don't want to lose. One thing I do like is the resale value on ebay if I do decide to cancel the whole experiment!