I am going to add yet another testimonial to why the Mac is the way it is by it's business model and my example will be my PC.
Three days ago my main hard drive in my PC died. The BIOS would not recognize it at all. My second hard drive was filled with data, and I did not want to wipe it, even though it was backed up. So, I went on down to the local computer store and picked up a 1TB Samsung HD w/ 32MB of cache for only $80! I thought that was insane...
So I popped in the HD and reloaded Vista Ultimate. I then had to go through the plethora of Windows updates and driver updates. Out of the box with Vista my PC has a lot of issues. The first and most annoying issues is that if it goes to sleep I can't wake it, with out the updated drivers from Asus for the advanced power management controller of my motherboard. Out of the box, this happens with Vista. Next is that my NIC has all sorts of performance issues with the stock driver in Vista as well. So I either gotta download that on another computer and copy it via thumb drive, or use the crappy performance and download it over the Internet, if I can. Next, and this one stumped me for about 5 full minutes, after I rebooted my PC it still said system boot disk not found replace and hit enter. After I had just replaced the HD, installed Vista on it and ran all the updates, I was like WTF is this crap?
So, I went into my BIOS and sure enough the new drive was recognized just fine, but after drilling through all the BIOS menus I saw that since my old HD had died and no longer was recognized it (my BIOS that is) automatically promoted my data drive as the first boot drive in the HD boot order. Well, I don't know who thought of this feature to put it in the BIOS but it is not like people run multiple OSes off of multiple drives and want zero down time with it....I guess if you are like running a RAID 1 that would be advantageous but I had all RAID stuff disabled.
Now compare that to when I swap out a failed HD on my Mac. I install the HD, install the OS, restore back ups and run updates. It just works. I don't deal with drivers or any other third party annoyance that can cause problems.
While my problems were not major problems but more of annoyances, I typically don't have those issues with the Mac platform.