In terms of apps, in digging around on the web I see that the general consensus is that Finder is a pile of poo, and indeed it is my experience of Finder when playing with Macs on and off that has put me off buying them for so many years. It is the main piece of junk in the OS, just laughably incapable particularly in comparison with how well-polished much of the rest of the user interface is.
I've installed muCommander which isn't polished but is perfectly capable, and that's made transferring files and generally setting things up the way I want much easier.
I am trialling VMWare Fusion (both this and Parallels do 30-day trials). The reason I tried this first is that it's half the price of Parallels, and I'm a cheap git. I have to say it works absolutely beautifully, installing a virtual Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit and another Windows XP Professional seamlessly, and running everything I've thrown at them. "Unity" mode is just amazing, allowing you to have the taskbar and the Mac desktop simultaneously. For the apps I need to run (very old Windows ones that are incompatible with virtually everything), they are a godsend.
Thunderbird took 10 years of emails over from the PC in seconds, and so far very happy. Running generally in 1920x1200 and occasionally in 2880x1400. What else? Chrome Canary, of course, and LibreOffice which seems fine. Installed MAMP and Netbeans, and that's all running lovely.
No problems at all, in short. Tremendous bit of kit. I am now firmly sitting on the dark side!
