I was a die-hard PC user since I was 15, but after a month on OS X I sold all but one of my PCs (I had 6) and got a Powerbook. I didn't buy it for the hardware, I bought it for the OS. The power of Unix is hard to beat, especially with the best GUI on the market.

Are they friendlier? No, the OS makes more sense and has many cool little features that make working on it LOGICAL. Just about anything that you think you should be able to do you probably can do. I was writing several gigabytes of data off of the network onto my powerbook and decided to move the folder in the middle of the copying process. It moved it and just continued the copy operation in its new location. Windows would throw a permissions error. Simple, transparent things like that abound.

Networking is a dream, I open the PB, and within seconds I'm on a wireless network. Oh, that's another thing that took some getting used to from PC laptops, I never turn the Apple off, I close the lid, the HD parks, and it goes in the bag. Then I open it and it starts up immediately, detects any connected networks, and you don't miss a beat.

Battery life is not an issue, I left it asleep in its bag for three days and lost about 3% of battery capacity. On my 12 inch I get 3-3.5 hours battery life running at full processor speed with bluetooth and wifi turned on.

As for image editing, yes, they are better. The entire OS is OpenGL accelerated, and color managed. You calibrate your monitor once through the system prefs or through a hardware solution and ALL software you run on it use the settings.

Only thing you'll miss is the right mouse button, but Newegg.com sells the excellent Logitech MX900 bluetooth mouse for 70 bucks.

And Expose is the best way to switch and manage multiple windows that I have ever used or seen. One button press and all the windows on the machine zoom out and you click on the one you want to bring to the front, thanks to having the entire OS based on PDF and OpenGL. Besides looking cool, it is a dream for someone like mee who works visually. Finding the button that corresponds to the right window on the Windows task bar was always a pain for me, now I just click on the window I want and get right back to work.

Eleven years on DOS and Windows and I have never been as productive as I am on a Mac, simnply because I ENJOY using it.