Not a bad thread; actually some decent comments inbetween the usuall mac/pc dribble.
For what it's worth, I have been in the IT field since 1993. I have seen many computers come and go. I started on macs (back when people called them apples) doing graphic design in the latter 80's and switched to pc's in the early 90's.
Any OS is fine if it does what you personally need it to do. As far as being better than the other, far and away the most stable OS I ever worked with was WinNT 4 with sp2 or later.

Crashing... guess what? They all crash under certain circumstances. Win, Mac, Linux, DOS, whatever. I've brought them all to thier knees.

Ease of use... all in the persective of the user. Efficiencey would be a far better category to look at.

Virus/etc... They all can get them these days and guess what? It's self inflicted. It's not the OS's fault, it's your fault for either not taking appropriate precautions or for actually executing it or both.

Durability... Mac zealots can tout this all they want, but there is no accurate way to compare them from a manufacturing standpoint to pc's. Apple makes macs. Period. One comany. Pc's are made by hundereds if not thousands of companies in addition to "joe public". They also make far fewer models than most major companies. The desktop section is pretty irrelevant, but on the laptop front, lets say mac vs. gateway... mac wins; I suppose, but it's not an apples to apples comparision. You really need to look at items with similar speed, quality of construction, etc. You also need to take warranties and extended service into account. I'll just comment on HP for example. You cannot buy a "business class" HP computer in a retail electronics store. You have to order it for the most part. What's the difference? Construction and warranty period. They cost more too... You are paying for that warranty service period. Oh, but get this, they'll come to you and fix it.

Disposiblity... Yes, lots of pc's are disposible. Again, you are talking general public retail garbage.
You get what you pay for. People that look for the cheapest solution without reguard to anything other than price will get what they deserve. A mac is a mac for the most part. All pc's are NOT created equal.
Most of my pc's have been built, not bought, but here's my experince. My current tower is just now 4 years old. I replaced one of the hard drives a year ago. It was the backup drive and I needed a larger one. (i run nightly backups of the enter pc and keep about 30 of them on file). As far as repairs, i've replaced several of the fans.
I generally keep them around this long before getting new. This one, however, I am going to keep longer, as it is still plenty fast at doing what I need it to do.
That NT4 box still exists. It's well over 10 years old. My folks had it after me and then gave it to the church. There's other 10+ year towers I built floating around my friends as well. that have gone from win95 though xp and still run on the original hardware and some have been changed to linux.
Now, are you going to be able to say this about your $299 emachine? Not a chance.

Back to mac, they do make nice hardware (notebooks). Now that they are intel based, what they need is an option for a windows keyboard and a friggin right click so I don't need to add a usb mouse if I don't want. I recently got a refurb macbook pro and set it up with boot camp for xppro. It works ok, but not great. It's a pretty half butted trade off on getting more software to run on a mac and IMO not greatly useful because of the reboot time and annoyance of the key differences and mouse. Parallels is probably a better route. The old Virtual pc worked ok as well.
I digress...
Oh, that factory refurb mac had a dead key on the keyboard. Has to go back.

Anyhow, PC for me, but mac is fine too. If they make a laptop setup for Windows as primary os, I would seriously consider it.

In sum, the one that is better is the one that is better FOR YOU.

There's one thing I hate about pc users. Advice. Every swinging door knob that ever installed extra RAM or reinstalled windows thinks they are pc technicians. That's a whole 'nother tread.
The only thing I really don't like about macs are certain users. The ones best desribed here:
(bad language warning: mod, please delete if inappropriate.)

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse....gi?u=macs_cant

Oh, btw, I drive a bmw 740il and i'm probably just as guilty as the mac users about talking about how awesome my car is. That's another thread too.