I'm new to this whole Mac thing, but here are my "pleasant" experiences with my brand-new, 27" top-notch iMac:
- Lion just hang up on me on the first day (mid-August) of booting it up
- not being able to empty trash since then, my 250GB SSD has about 40GB of unusable trash on it right now
- hopefully my iMac was only upgraded from Snow Leopard (I just hope it was upgrade because of the Leopard DVD included, not clean install of Lion) and it might solve my problems
- Because of the above thing, I don't have a Lion purchase in my AppStore account, so no install kit to download
- I use PPPoE internet connection - the fastest and most reliable - but since this type of connection isn't supported by Apple, I have to find a way around it to try and re-install Lion in the hope of solving the instability issues
- brand new Duracell battery always low on both mouse and keyboard, disconnecting when I'd need them most. And it's not hardware issue.
- My 2008 PC (1200$) built around a Dual-core E6600 (65nm) and a 8600GT video card with regular HDD is almost as fast in Photoshop CS5.5 as my SSD-based iMac. You might not believe it, but in my experience editing an image take just as long on both machines. And it's not a hardware issue.
I don't know about you, guys, but my experience with MacOSX and the "reliable" Apple care was anything but good so far. I spent about 6 Hours with AppleCare trying to solve the above things and more, but no success. I maybe mistaken, since I only have my iMac for a few months, but I say that right now Lion is worse than Vista was back in 2008 - I never had problems like these on it. Don't know about Leopard, since I've never used it, but it seems that my expectations were far too high for Apple.
I can't say anything about the design and built quality - they are really exceptional, no PC can ever grow to this level, but given this experience, if things won't change drastically in the near future (tomorrow after a fresh install of Lion) I'll say I have a very-very-very expensive paperweight on my desk.