Gav, you will always find apple lovers and apple haters, and it really depends. For me, I have had both over the years and I, personally, would never go back to apple. I found that they look great, the sound is great, the connection to the internet is great and by and large the Apple machines are solid. But they are also gimmicky. They are very expensive and they want you to upgrade all the time. I had a 4 year old Macbook pro and Apple no longer supported upgrades for it. Madness. When the firmware for my DVDRW was outdated, they had nothing to upgrade to. They suggested that I install windows via bootcamp and get a Dell firmware update for the DVD drive!!!! That is the truth. But even apart from that, I found that windows based machines are just easier to run, to maintain, to keep up to date, to find software for, and to be compatible with. And remember adobe do Windows versions for all their photography and imaging software.
You could find an Apple lover who may suggest the opposite to me, but I was open minded enough to try and have both. I'll never go back to Apple Mac.
Good luck