I'm not exactly an objective source, but I have to chime in anyway.

If you are doing MS Office, you'll find that Office for he Mac is great. If you're doing presentations, Keynote will wow your audience even more than Powerpoint -- and, once you get used to the differences between it and Powerpoint, you'll like it better and find it easier and faster to use. Powerpoint works on the Mac as well, of course, but Keynote was developed by Apple, so it integrates a bit more.

For music, you'll love iTunes on the Mac. I don't even know where some of my CDs are anymore. I ripped them all to iTunes and long forgot about them. Now, if, for some reason, I get an actual CD (instead of downloading), it gets ripped and then forgotten with the rest.

Safari is a very good web browser, with nice tabbed browsing, a great wat to handle bookmarks, and easily blocked pop-ups through a single click.

Mail is getting better. Now that Panther has come out, I think it's better than Entourage, the Microsoft offfice mail app for the Mac.

iChat AV is great. You will no longer need to call your Mac friends on the phone, since audio conferencing through iChat is just as good -- and no long distance charges. There are a few things I would like to see improved: better grouping of buddies (this sucks now), multiple person audio/video chats (you can do multiple person text chats but not AV), a few tweaks here and there to the interface, and a couple of bug fixes. We're only on version 1, so I'm sure we can expect some improvements down the road.

Tie it together with the other integrated apps: Address Book, iPhoto, iMovie, iCal, etc, and you'll be set.

Additionally, I think right now is a good time to get an iBook. They just went through a major revision in October, jumping to G4 processors and gaining 802.11G and Bluetooth support, along with some other nice improvements.

Along with the iBook, pick up a book on OS X to help ease the transition to the new system. Go to Amazon and browse the ratings/reviews to find one that will be the best for you. Try to find one that is about OS X version 10.3, Panther, and not the previous OS versions. I like the books Robin Williams puts out.

You would not be disapointed with an ibook. Go for it. It will enhance your life! You can't say that about just any old computer.