I recently switched from a Dell laptop to a macbook pro for my personal machine. My first reaction was similar to yours about working with windows outlook vs. working with the apple mail app. My favorite way to work with outlook was to open a large message window and then use the arrows to work through my mail. Neither the apple mail app or entourage allow you to do this. I ended up liking the apple app. better than entourage. Now that I am used to it, I quite like the use of the track pad to scroll through messages.....two fingers to scroll through a message and three fingers to advance to the previous or next message.

I am still using a few windows applications with windows XP. I use Quicken--the Mac application has nothing but bad press. I also use a couple of excel spread sheets that have macros (ms basic macros are not supported on the mac). I will probably run turbotax on windows, but the disk has both windows and mac applications included.

VMware fusion is quite amazing. i was able to port over my whole Dell laptop, operating system, applications and all files to my mac. It runs windows at least as well as my dell laptop did, and actually seems more stable than my 3 year old Dell.. Most of the time I use the mac applications (mail,safari, ms office, etc.). I use windows as a virtual machine and can switch from any of the mac apps to windows pretty seamlessly and quickly.