Hey! I'm in Taipei.
It's true that there are no apple stores here; only "authorized resellers". In my experience as of late, the "authorized resellers" (4 different ones I've been to) are hard to deal with in that they don't seem to know anything about macs, they don't have and demo 24 inch models to play with, they say that I can't buy my hardware upgraded in any way except for ram (and I think I could buy RAM somewhere else cheaper anyway) and they really don't seem very interested in selling me a damn computer (even with way too much impusle money on me in cash!)
Just venting my frustrations. They don't seem to have a refurb program as well here and I'm wary to order one online and have it shipped here. The NTD$ prices seem to work out to be the same as the apple store website from the US.
If you click the buy buttons on the apple taiwan website they don't have the options page to upgrade your hardware either, but there's a number you can call. I haven't called it yet. Waiting for announcements before I get real serious.
It's good to know about the student discount program. I'm a student at one of the uni's here and I'm certainly going to look into that if I can find someone who wants to sell me a computer!
Oh, and the keyboards are the same but they come printed with weird symbols called "bu pu mu fu" which is a phonetic alphabet as well as the standard one we're all used to.
so here comes my first post.