Cheapest, easiest, best! I guess it all depends on other constraints. Im my case these constraints are multiple workstations and speed of transfer.
If I were starting over for a one-to-one transfer, I think I'd go for Bluetooth with the iMac and its laptop. And that's not just to curry favour with Danny!
In yesterday's (Mon 15 Jan 2001) Times Interface there was a review of the Bluetooth wireless technology and it was impressive. Midland Mainline Trains are to run a trial of Bluetooth on the London-Leeds run. There'll almost certainly be bandwith problems initially. But on a one-to-one basis it is terrific as my son-in-law's kit shows.
BTW, AP, if coax cable gives you a pain in the backside, you must be using it for a purpose for which it was not intended.
The benefits of UTP over coax are its flexibility and resilience. But coax takes more nodes and goes further and you don't need hubs. My domestic LAN has 14 nodes and two printers on servers using coax. Never a hint of a problem over two years and using cables made up myself. Only two golden rules with coax; don't bend it too tightly (use a large radius of curvature) and terminate properly. (Not difficult to make up your own terminators at 50p each and never more than two).
I keep an old spare Ethernet NIC to put into a PC I am working on and a short length of made up coax and I can backup to my laptop or swap files to the sick PC at Network speeds of 10 mega bits/sec (or >60 MBytes/min in practice). When you've got a GByte of data to move it's the only acceptably quick way.