No one can say Mac or PC is better, it depends on the user. I was trying to figure his level of technical capabilities to steer him in a direction that would work well for him. I hate to see someone pay Apple tax just because everyone else is, but that may be his best option.
I can say Apple is better, because I have about 30-odd years of professional experience, and have worked with both products actually since both of their inceptions.
What people see as a "Macintosh" is simply the display face of the operating system. The Aqua GUI has ever window element, text, graphics, or widgets is drawn on-screen using the anti-aliasing technology making Macs exceptionally clearer than even Windows 7 using like hardware (and both OS's can run on Intel hardware.)
Apple machines, both PC and iPhone, use an evolutionary variant of the MACH kernel with parts from FreeBSD's and NetBSD's implementation of Unix were incorporated in Nextstep, the core of Mac OS X.
Mach is an operating system microkernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University for true parallel computation - something that in 1985 when it was written was almost unheard of in desktop computing. At the time, any "multitasked" computer was actually switched multitasking, meaning that one app ran for a few cycles then gave way to the next. Mach threaded its apps so that all ran at the same time, according the administrators wishes. This came down from the original UNIX developed by ATT. Mach was one of the earliest examples of a microkernel, and still the standard by which similar projects are measured. It is a drop-in replacement for the traditional UNIX kernel and in some ways outperforms most other kernels, including the vaunted Linux and BSD ones.
Apple's edition is probably the best closed-source kernel available.
Windows, on the other hand, was until Vista a very poorly implementation of a layered design that consists of two main components, user mode and kernel mode. It is a preemptive, reentrant operating system, techincally inferior in many ways to a like Unix-based kernel. Programs and subsystems in user mode are limited in terms of what system resources they have access to, while the kernel mode has unrestricted access to the system memory and external devices. All too often, sub-kernel parts like DLLs and apps are given kernel access.
That access is the weakness of Windows and the exact "why" it has so many security issues. While a properly used UNIX system NEVER gives kernel access to applications, Windows, even in Windows 7, does by design. To overcome that flaw, one has to pay a performance tax (what we call a Microsoft Tax here) by layering security over the operating system in order to keep it safe. Common products like Mcafee or Symantec can and do regularly use upwards of 30% of CPU and memory resources on desktop computers, and overly complicate matters besides that such that a Windows machine is constantly hamstrung by the need to overcome its weakness in its core design.
Even then, one is dependent on constant vigilance and the need to upgrade, update and constantly use security products, all in the hope that the chosen vendor has done a good job of keeping its customers ahead of the bad guy curve.
That is not to say that Windows is not a good product, it is. It is simply not a GREAT product, which OS/X is.
Windows core strength in my mind is the fact that its overwhelming market share has given it an application base that is far beyond what is available for the Mac. Games, specialized applications and others are widely available for Windows but not to be found on the Mac.
I am by no means a Mac bigot -- I have an iMac, a pair of Dells and a pair of Linux servers in my house, and at work I administer more Microsoft servers than I care to count. All that said, I strongly feel from a technical standpoint that Apple makes the better product for the average user and that any "Mac tax" is offset by not needing to constantly purchase and tend to security products nor replace the machine as often. A Mac will last 5 years before obsolescence while a Wintel machine really starts getting slow and old at about 3 years. That's 3 replacements for every 2 Macs.
And oh by the way, you can run Windows as a virtual machine in a duo-core or quad-core Mac if you really need to have Windows running as part of your life. You cannot do that on a PC (legally anyway, but it's done.)
That's all opinion, though, and YMMV.
