I just got a 15" MacBook Pro for college. There is a link the Apple store to get a product for education, and it'll knock off a couple hundred dollars from the cost. i'm putting open office on mine (which i like much better than the current version of microsoft office *shivers*)
i've had an hp laptop for about 3 years now, running XP. right now it's just sitting on my desk, unused, and even though the hardware was up to date when i got it, even XP was often a pain
i've used mac's as often as i can, and i've always found them more user friendly than windows
all macbook pro's include bootcamp, which makes it extremely easy to set up a dualboot. you need a license for the second os, but since hp gave me a copy of vista for free...
and i only ever use the vista boot to play crysis