My laptop died today. I got a loaner from work, plugged in my time machine backup and two hours later, after watching "UP" with Aki I had a working laptop. Four months ago this would have taken me 5-10 hours of work over several days to recover from. If this were a PC I never would have had such an amazing backup solution so in my opinion the Apple tax just paid dividends.
The loaner laptop I got was my second. My initial thought was I could make do with an IBM Thinkpad loaner. I've been using macs at work for 5 years now and I'm exclusively Mac at home as of last year. Dealing with a Windows laptop for work was an extraordinary painful experience. The hardware was a monstrosity, the OS (XP) was annoying at best, and the crap on the laptop to deal with the silliness (Virus, Malware, Wireless connectivity tools, etc) was maddening. I've used Windows 7, and its still very rough around the edges. Honestly, I'd love a competitor for OSX but there simply isn't anything else that comes close to working for me then OSX.
By the way, "UP" is a great movie.
