You know Petzold has a Windows tattoo, right?

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000427.html

This 419 spammer was tricked into getting a tattoo:

http://www.419eater.com/html/okorie.htm

It's been done for Vista. Sad, yet true. :)
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=141404

It's not the logo form, it's the exxed-out-eyes "Sad Mac" that appeared on my overclocked SE/30 in 1990 when I was facing a tragic data-loss. I spent a week holed up in a room with nothing but a pizza-ordering phone and a carton of cigarettes and several boxes of Mac parts, recovering ten thousand files, one at a time, with a hex editor. Then I got the tattoo.

Dare, I would recommend that unless you have a really good reason, you should not make the switch to Mac. As someone who has used PCs for my entire life and recently switched to Mac, it's a painful and expensive journey. (Fortunately, Plaxo paid for the actual system itself :) )

There's not much appreciable difference between Mac and PC (except that the Mac is slower). Haha, bring on the flames!

Oh, the Mac is MOST definitely slower. I purchased an iBook last October/November timeframe for testing purposes (Safari and Mono compatbility) but will admit that for the first 30 to 60 minutes of playing around I was beginning to find a few things here and there that caused me to wonder if I might find myself using it more often.

Then reality set in and I began to notice all of the little annoying things -- things like absolutely no sense of activity taking place on the machine (no LED's designed for such a purpose.) Not that this is a crucial feature that I just can't live without, but when you don't gain ANY feedback beyond the spinning wheel when thing begin to get overloaded you find yourself getting a little annoyed that the machine is taking SO FLIPPIN' LONG to do something which should be fairly simple... Like closing an application which seems to take a rediculous amount of time for what seems like no apparent reason.

Theres a list a mile long of stupid little things that are nothing worth spending time speaking about, but I will state that while I would never even consider running my Mac full-time, owning one has forced me to think about development from a different perspective that falls more in line with how one might go about developing some of the nicer features of the Mac into applications for Windows. Not patent-type features (although it wouldn't surprise me if Apple felt otherwise) and more just a "clean room" type atmosphere that the Mac tends to do a nice job of.

So for what its worth, it definitely wouldn't be a bad thing to purchase a Mac, and with the Intel chips now standard, and what I am sure is easy access to the internal builds of the next IntelMac versions of Virtual PC, (in all seriousness I have no knowledge that one even exists being the ability to add two and two and make four) then it certainly wouldn't be a "Lock-Down" type move, and my guess is that you will probably find benefit in your own design and development work.

Oh, and regarding Operating Systems and Tatoos...

I know none other more famous than > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Petzold

I love my macs. Are they slower than my PC? I really can't say. About the only time I have run into a perf issue is when I'm editing HD quality video from my video camera. Then on my dual proc g5 1.8 GHz + 1 gig of ram mac I have to turn off all other programs. Otherwise I find my Mac to be quite snappy. I actually stopped using Windows when I left MS. I went to Linux for a bunch of years but eventually the pain level got too high and I bought my Mac and have been a happy camper ever since. It gives me all the power and flexibility of unix with a decent UI (I never could stand KDE or, horrors, Gnome) and great software.