Windows is for beer drinkers. Macs are for wine drinkers. Linux is for Mountain Dew drinkers. In the majority of cases it’s more about identifying with an image than anything else.

Linux is great and I use it personally (on my servers and firewall) and professionally but the management overhead is high compared to OS X. Even with aptget or up2date it gets tiresome having to rebuild the packages I’ve come to rely on.

And OS X has un*x underlying it so when I need to do un*xy stuff my MBP is right there.

For a personal, portable machine Mac’s are near perfect because you don’t have the hassles. Also, even though I’ve got Parallels I’ve never bothered to install Windows in the VM because I got interrupted during the installation but have never had the need to finish it.

For server side stuff I don’t go past Linux (unless we’re talking corporate in which case it has gotta be Solaris)

Instead of a MBP, I’ll stick with a non-Mac and a big HDTV.

Big HDTV > aura

I was warned against buying recently-introduced models; but if you get one that’s been on the market for a few months and had the bugs worked out, they seem to be quite robust.
Data: I took an informal survey before I bought my Macbook (I asked everybody I could find who had owned a Mac laptop a year before – about 8 people, so not exactly statistically significant, but is more than just a collection of anecdotes). I found one person who had retired a five(?)-year-old iBook and replaced it with a current Macbook and one person who had replaced a stolen Macbook with the then-current model; everybody else was still using the same one they had had for a year or three.

“Again, what am I getting extra when I buy the Mac?”

Something that was designed by a perfectionist?
If you want big numbers at low prices, switching to a Mac won’t add any value, but if you’re planning on keeping it for a while and/or carrying it around a lot (y’know, what laptops are allegedly built for), you’re better off buying good quality hardware instead of relying on getting lucky. If you go that way, Apple is the only company I’ve found that at least attempts to build quality into their entire product line – anything else, you’re looking at a high-spec $2k+ machine if you want something that’s robust enough to carry around every day for a few years.

Also, do Macs ever break in the first year?

As for Mac Minis, they start at £500. I can get an HP Desktop for less than £400, with a better specification. Again, what am I getting extra when I buy the Mac?

Buy one of each. Carry them around everywhere you go for a year. See which one survives.
My last laptop was an Acer that went through two batteries and two motherboards in a year and a half. My current Macbook is getting close to two years old and hasn’t had any problems.
(Of course, if you’re not planning on taking it with you, you can probably get a Mac Mini for less than the Acer.)

Anecdotes are not data, but they do make you wonder.

Only if you are a lazy thinker (and I’m not suggesting you are).

A MBP is £1400 from the Apple store (£1200 from elsewhere). I’ve just found an Acer with a better spec for £740. Are you really saying that the MBP is worth the extra?