ight now, I use Affinity photo, designer, and publisher, polarr photo editor, and wix for website creation. Plus MS services right now as I have a 365 sub.
Well, if you asked on this forum for software recommendations for those tasks
on Mac, Affinity would probably be among the top recommendations for photo/vector/DTP. Whatever reasons you have for using Polarr as well as Affinity would still stand. "What you see is what you get" website creation applications are about as dead on Mac as they are on Windows so you'd likely end up with an online tool like wix... and if you interact with the outside world you'd probably end up needing that 365 sub as well.
If you want to switch to Mac then you don't want a touchscreen on your laptop. You may think you do, you may have had hallucinations of the touchscreen on your PC being useful, but that's just the toxic gasses emitted by Windows affecting your brain and causing you to doubt the truth of the gospel of Jobs. Seriously, though, now the M1 can run iPad/iPhone apps and people are finding that (amongst other issues) these suck without a touchscreen, there's a stronger case for future MacBooks having a touch screen.
I don't think anybody will forgive Apple for what they did with Aperture - and there have been other instances where they've dropped apps or replaced them with half-baked "improved" versions (e.g. Final Cut Pro X and "new" Apple Maps had very shaky starts). On the other hand, if Mac is indeed "better", one of the reasons for it is that Apple
are prepared to dump things and force users to move on, whereas the windows world is a martyr to backwards-compatibility. It's one of the things that enables Apple to keep switching processor architectures and making major OS changes. Meanwhile, sadly, the whole "rent your software" or "your hardware/software stops working when our servers stop" business is an industry-wide trend, not just Apple.
GarageBand, as you mention, is one area where Apple is ahead of the game, and may even be their best application software product... especially when you outgrow it and have such an easy migration path to Logic (which is also half the price of full Ableton etc. plus free updates - something to offset against the "Apple tax"). Also, Mac does seem to do better than Windows for audio/MIDI stuff without so many driver hassles - although it's certainly not glitch-free. If creating music is a Big Thing for you then that's probably your strongest argument for Mac.
...however, whatever you do, I wouldn't switch right now.
First
forget Intel - with Apple Silicon, Apple once again have a unique hardware offering that goes beyond a PC clone in a nice case with a MacOS license. The launch of the M1 seems to have been a big success, and although some exaggerated claims abound, when you compare like-with-like (i.e. ultraportable laptop with integrated graphics) they clearly have game-changing performance. However, they're
still Apple's "entry level" machines and have severe limitations in terms of number of ports, support for external displays, max RAM capacity etc. So, unless you have money to burn or desperately have to have a new computer
today I'd at least want to
know what the new mid-range Macs are going to offer. It's also possible that the new MBP, Air and Mini will be fairly short-lived models that get replaced with more radical re-designs when they switch to MiniLED displays (...and if Apple
were going to U-turn on touchscreens, that would be when it would make sense to happen).
Also - yeah, Apple's annual major OS upheaval is a royal pain, but is easily avoided by not upgrading until a few point releases have gone by and everybody has fixed their software. The only time you
can't do that is if you buy a brand new Mac that can only use the latest version - and that goes double for the switch to M1. Give it time to settle down and remember that the early worm gets the bird, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
