Mixture, thanks you brought back some positive memories with that post. 10 years ago or thereabouts I was contracted by a company to port their Java app to a whole bunch of Unix like systems including Mac OSX 10.3. The porting to the Mac was such a positive experience that both my boss and the lead dev ended up purchasing Mac laptops. I was later tasked to develop a utility that re-imaged Macs located in a university lab environment depending on what course was being run. I was later told that this big US university had successfully applied my utility eighty thousand times over a couple of months after its release. I learnt a lot about Macs then and they got a lot of my respect, also glad to learn from your post they haven't changed much at that level, however they were quite pricey and beyond my financial capacity at that time which is why I didn't jump ship.
So I think you have sized me up wrongly with my previous viewpoint, but I think you missed the sarcasm.
Notwithstanding, I hated iTunes when it first came out and still hate it today, I'll spare you the reasons why but I think you may already know, but as best as I can tell that's not going to be a showstopper for choosing a Mac.
I loathe the new Apple iStore concept, it's overcrowded with so many tyre kickers making it hard to get the right person to talk too and making the buying experience extremely impersonal - yet they are the cheapest suppliers of Macs by far so I need to visit it which I'm not looking forward to.
I have a few requirements that still need some thinking about, like solving my 2Tb disk problem which most laptops (Mac or PC) cannot solve, and I don't want NAS etc because the replacement machine I choose will not be networked most its life as I use other "sacrificial" laptops for my internet. But this detail, like a few more I have is solvable - just need to throw a few more dollars at it to make it work as I like it.
I don't plan on developing apps (and really don't want to) however I'm kinda fortunate to have started a new opportunity that has a customer base of well over 1 million clients per day, and should I go down the app dev path I could do it properly for both systems using a Mac (forget about that Adobe crosscompiler - it doesn't do high end style).
With regards to what my local dealer said, well that's his opinion and he's entitled to it, I'm now motivated in contacting a past work colleague who purchased a Macbook Pro in late 2012 after being a pc person all his life and get his opinion too.
So in the end your advice has been important to me and was definitely not a waste of time.