VeliPekka, I have read with interest your questions and the considered replies.
I do not think you will be happy going Mac. But then, some people like to have something to complaining about. In particular, the criticism you have singled out regarding PCI Express versus PCI is a joke. It goes with the territory of having a single manufacturer and is annoying, but understandable, and better than the alternative which is the boat anchor of supporting legacy hardware. PCI is ten or twelve years old on the Mac, it has outlasted every other standard I can think of. Follows is a list of Apple hardware I personally have embraced, invested in, and had to write off as a loss: 5¼ diskettes, so much better than tape, brilliant! 3½ diskettes, so much nicer than floppies, brillant! Zip disk, crap from the beginning, I was quite dismayed Apple made this choice. DVD RAM, would have been brilliant if the drives also wrote CD-Rs. Apple was horribly late with CD burning, but the Combo and Super drives we have now are quite nice, and Mac had those before they became common on PCs. 25 pin serial, brilliant! (Hey, this was like 30 years ago. Is it not ironic that one can still find this on some contempory PCs?) RJ11 connectors for mouse and keyboard, brilliant! Apple Desktop Bus (ADB), earlier and better than PS/2, brilliant! DIN 8 serial, used for modem, printer, and networking, brilliant! AAUI connector for networking, could convert to RJ45 or Token Ring as needed. Sounds brilliant, but not so much, as Token Ring was already dead, and it was way too expensive. SCSI, still miss this one, but FireWire is even better! Apple II Bus NuBus PDS PCI 32 bit, then 64 Apple video (did that have a name?), earlier and better than VGA, brilliant! ADC, DVI + USB + power, brilliant! 65C02 68000 series PPC series G3/G4/G5 SoVeli-Pekka, I can emphathize with you. But you do *not* have my sympathy.
