You've made it nearly impossible to refute your logic by accusing anyone with a different opinion than your own of being motivated by brand loyalty.
I also have several years of experience using both mobile platforms, professionally and for personal use. Apple offers a 17" model with a 1920x1200 resolution, more than fair for a display of that size. They offer a standard resolution (which you'd find on the majority of displays in this screen size, by many PC manufacturers) on their base 15" models, with an available upgrade to 1680x1050.
Anything higher than a 1680x1050 resolution on a 15" display would be uncomfortable to use. I'll give you that it's highly subjective, but as an individual who works in the web development and multimedia industries and enjoys higher resolution for productivity reasons, even I find anything past that starts to get silly.