i'm far from an apple loving zealot as you put it, it took me years to finally switch and having never used a mac I was pleasantly surprised. Most people who slate macs won't even have a go on one. I very rarely encountered viruses etc under windows but if you don't maintain windows it slows down alot. Under osx there is no need to defrag/reinstall every so often as there is no slow down. I went on my pc the other day and was shocked at how laggy everything was. Theres not much waiting under osx, even boot/shutdown times are quick. I still use windows almost daily in work etc, but if I could I would use macs most of the time.
I know mac users can be snobby/never shut up about them - but they are pretty damn good.
I tried various flavours of linux and hated how unuserfriendly it was, but osx is so effortless to use.