Uh...it is in fact a quite tough question.
If you ask that question to a Windoze fan, he will probably tell you that: Macs suck/What is Mac?/Yeah, I've tried the Mac theme for my Windoze XP... or something like that.
If you ask that question to a Mac guy, you will hear something like "YES!Mac is the best system forever!".
If you ask that question to a linuxoid, he almost certain will just answer "Linux rules" and go away.
But from my point of view, Mac is totally worth that money.BTW, you will avoid the price of anti-virus programs that are necessary on Windoze.And it's UNIX-like.
You can decide for yourself of course, though I'd rather buy that Mac than something less useful.But if there is a choice between Linux and Mac OS X, I couldn't resist the open-source.
P.S.I'm using an iMac 2008, that I've bought for only $600 and I'm totally satisfied with all my needs.
P.P.S.My iMac is PowerPC, but all of the newer Macs are Intel, so if you want you could virtualize Windows (VirtualBox, Wine, VMWare although it's expensive, etc...).Windoze was(deleted in 2008) running pretty fast for me on VMWare Fusion(you can even play fullscreen 3D games).And it was using about 80% CPU if the emulator was the only app running.