I must say this was one of the best investments I have ever made in my life.
I have been a PC (Windows) user all my life, only really having used Macs at university. I remember I was impressed with their performance, as well as the quality of the software available for it. After my PC died, I decided to take the plunge and go for Mac.
The first thing you notice when you unpack it is how absolutely gorgeous it is. The screen is endless and it looks good anywhere around the house.
The next best thing is the fact that you hardly need to do anything at all to boot it for the first time - there is none of that fight over wires and what goes where, etc, etc. Put batteries on the mouse and keyboard (if they're wireless, otherwise just plug them in), plug the computer to an electric socket and voilá!
The set-up is very simple, and I even managed to connect it to my wireless brodband modem in a matter of minutes. Not one installation CD required!
There is always a period of adaptation, during which you're still finding your way around the commands, etc. Many of them are exactly like Windows, but some are not. Most of the time, you can find out easily enough. For the trickier doubts the website offers very comprehensive help and support. You should also consider buying their extended apple support package, as you can relax for three years.
A word of advice, if you are used to a PC mouse, perhaps you should stick to a two button mouse. Apple mice look good, true, but that right hand button is really useful, in my opinion! Any good brand of mice will sell wireless ones which you can plug to a USB port and be fully compatible with macs. At least don't splurge on one of those apple supermice until you've tried the simple one and found you liked it.
The screen is brilliant, has excellent definition and, as I said, is vast. For the first time in my life I'm only using part of the screen to work in a word processor.
It comes with speakers, webcam and microphone built in. No wires and compatibility problems again.
The processor is super fast and the graphics card has been able to handle anything I've thrown at it so far. I work with genealogy programs and sometimes need to work with databases with 60,000 people, and build family trees that are several metres long! This computer can process these about five times faster than my previous PC.
True, it is expensive. Also, if you pay for software it will not be the cheapest. But there is a very big network of Mac-fans who release hundreds of useful (or not) programs for mac either free, or for a small shareware cost. True, if you want Office, you must pay. But just think: isn't it better to have a system where you can't install every dodgy little program you can find on the WWW swamping your hard drive with drivel and (very often) spyware and viruses?