I am forced to use XP on my work laptop. My personal laptop is a MacBook Pro. The former is a dog, the latter is like a cold beer after a day's hard labour in the baking sun.
Macs are fantastic for people who want to use a computer without knowing anything about how it actually works, however if you want to get down and dirty you can get your rocks off with a bash shell and its supreme power all you like. Their renowned stability is due to the tight control Apple retain over the hardware on which their software runs. They are one of a very few who have this luxury, and the only major vendor of desktops who fall into this category.
The modern Microsoft experience is born from the fact that their business model makes it easier to illegally crush superior products and pay the fines than it does to play fair and win on merit. Some of their products are outstanding; SQL Server and Exchange are 2 points of note - neither of which were the result of Microsoft "innovation". Every good Microsoft product has been the result of acquisitions. Their products fit together like pieces from a jigsaw, but some of those pieces are so rotten they can never be fixed. The current incarnations of Windows are built on a fundamentally flawed monolithic architecture which has gone so far down a road it simply cannot turn back; UAC is the ultimate example of a dirty hack to camoflague the immature security model beneath. When you load Windows you're submitting to the "get what you're given" methodology (of which Apple are also guilty, to a large extent), but fortunately for Microsoft the average user who knows absolutely nothing about computers or how they work is oblivious. For most people this is of no concern. These people consider antivirus, firewalls, religious patching and anti-spyware software to be "normal". Active Directory today still fails to provide even basic features that Sun and Novell were incorporating into their directory services 15 years ago.
Outside the mainframe territory, Unix platforms remain the only real option for enterprise-grade, mission-critical infrastructure. Ask your bank what it runs... does it run Windows? Does it bollocks. I've contracted for most of them and it's z/OS and Solaris all the way; andfor good reason. Microsoft have matured in terms of their server offerings, but they're still micky mouse as far as the big picture is concerned.
As someone with a stack of certs from most of the major vendors I like to try and remain solution-agnostic, and for most people Windows suits their needs and they've long since been brainwashed into simply accepting its shortcomings as "normal". Almost like speaking English; it's a bastardised, hack-job language, but most of us prefer it to the many pure and logical alternatives out there because it's what we know.
Linux isn't ready for the desktop. Sorry, but it isn't. I'd stake my life on it for a globally scalable, mission-critical server installation, but it lacks the ecosystem of software built around it that Windows has. Driver issues are certainly not the fault of Linux developers.
I occasionally used to help friends out with their computer problems. These days I simply don't have time. My advice to them? Buy a mac. I've never had such a quiet life.