I bought my first mac (intel mini) about the first of June. I'd never messed with a mac before that, except maybe 5-10min total the few times I'd walked into an Apple store.
I almost bought a mini when they first came out as I was curious to see what the mac OS was like, but didn't want to spend a grand or more on hardware (at the time the low end model mini was $499 I believe).
I actually went into the Apple store to buy one and immediately I was like "what am I doing? Why do I need a mac? I could spend this $500 on pc upgrades" so I left and that was that.
When the intel macs were announced I didn't pay much attention. That is until boot camp was released. I was already thinking about upgrading my aging pc (always built my own) but the thought of being able to tinker with OSX while having a full fledged windows box a couple of clicks away was certainly appealing.
So I take another trip to the Apple store. Once again, I get that funny feeling like "what am I doing here?" I asked 1 sales guy "do you have XP on any of these?" and he said "no." I just wanted to see how it ran. But when he said "no" I said "ok, thanks", turned and left. But this time it was still in my mind that I wanted one.
So I was at Fryes a week later and got talking to a sales guy there that was a mac user. It basicaly came down to "if I don't just buy it on the spur of the moment, if I take time to think about it, I'll never buy it." So I bought it, got home with no clue what to expect.
I can't say that I found it immediately easy to use. It was just that things were different from what I was so used to. I also had a few glitches at first that didn't set me off on the right foot (had a couple crashes where it just kept rebooting because I had a cdrom stuck in the drive). But since then its been pretty smooth sailing.
I never did install bootcamp like I thought I would. When I bought the mini I had it in my mind I'd instal bootcamp and XP right away. I'd continue to use XP primarily while learning OSX slowly. But weeks went by and I never did it.
I did get parallels before the price went up in mid July I think it was but have only used it a handful of times, just to see what it was like (it IS cool). I need more ram before I can really use it (only have stock 512mb). I reformatted my old pc and put in my sons room. I've not been on a pc at all since I bought the mini, except to reformat my old one and set it up in my sons room.
About all I do it web, email, pictures, music, so basic other things, and the mini is ideal for that. The one major thing ive said over and over that I LOVE about it is the tiny size and its absolutely whisper quiet. My last pc had so many intake and exhaust fans it was stupid. Sooo loud and annoying.
My younger kids, 3, 5, and 7 have no problem with the mini. They know how to get on the internet and how to bring up itunes, that's all they care about.
I won't proclaim a mac is the greatest thing in the history of the world like other people. Frankly, I never had any real issues with my XP boxes (win98 is another story though, very crash happy). XP was very stable in my experience with it. I just simply didn't want to build another pc box. Already had enough sitting around the house. And I was curious to see what OSX was all about. That's why I went with a mac.
I will say that my wife and I did like mac/osx enough that we ended up getting her a macbook within a month of buying the mini. Her 2.5yr old sony vaio was about to totally die from undiagnosed hardware problems (overheating, bad power supply on mobo, video problems, who knows). Luckily it held out long enough to transfer all her files off to the macbook. And the most ironic thing is the vaio cost us $1300 when we bought it, and the macbook only $1000. So much for macs being more expensive. (I just sold the vaio to a guy yesterday for $175. It did finally give up the ghost and wouldn't power on at all. But he knew that, he was a laptop repair tech and didn't care)
Anyway...long story short, unless you have things that can ONLY be done on a windows box, and with bootcamp and parallels you can do those on a mac anyway, you won't be sorry. If you are just an average user of basic things like me (web, mail, music, etc) the mac will more than suffice.