I'm thinking about switching over to the Mac later this winter. I've seen the future Microsoft has planned and quite frankly, the prospect of paying for software that they should be paying me to test for them just galls me. Microsoft has blown one opportunity after another to clean up the security vulnerabilities in Windows and they simply refuse to do it, preferring instead of foist Yet Another User Interface upon people.

The virtualization possible with the Intel Macs based on the Core Duo (and later Core platforms) should be substantially faster than the emulation of an x86 Windows environment on the PowerPC Macs. The new virtualization support in the latest Intel and AMD processors allows for virtual machines more along the lines of VM/370, rather than the previous per-instruction emulation or previous Windows application migration shells.

The one drawback I see in the Mac market is that they're still weak in business applications. For myself, I see no stock/commodity trading applications, no plans by any brokerage or dealer to support Mac trading applications other than those implemented in Java on a browser. This is what has held me back from migrating off Windows and to the Mac when they released OS X a couple years ago. Now that I can see a way to run Windows and Windows-based applications at near native speeds, there is nothing to prevent me from migrating to the Mac. Dual-booting a machine isn't what I wanted -- I've wanted the desktop equivalent of VM/370 for years, and now it is finally starting to appear and the hardware support is finally there in the Core chipset.

FWIW, I programmed and used Macs from 1986 to 1996 or so.

Here is a review of what appears to be the slickest virtualization environment currently available on the Mac:

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2006/06/27/parallels-desktop-for-mac.html