Man o man am I in like ultimate fanboy mode today...I'm also working from home for the first week in a long time so I'm just giddy...

I used to agree that they *seemed* more expensive, but I made the argument that if you speced out a similar PC it would be about the same...It had been a while since I'd taken a close look, so I decided to check again.

Here's dell's offering (with Vista):
http://www.archatechs.com/dell.tiff
$1975.00

Here's a black Macbook:
http://www.archatechs.com/apple.tiff
$1,499.00 (before education discount, if one applies for you)

As best as I can tell, the Dell does come with a better video card, so maybe you can justify an additional $100 for the dell...but they only offer G (or A/G) wireless cards where the Mac's come with N chips...
Of course the mac comes with iLife, which I'd personally value at about $100...so maybe its a wash.

Bottom line, it appears that PCs actually cost more!

Of course you can find a $500 PC laptop out there, in which case, yes a Mac costs more. But if that is your price range then you should be prepared for what you are getting. If you just want a portable email and web surfing machine, its probably a better option than either of the machines listed above...but if you expect to get into multimedia, photos, advanced applications (say like running Outlook, Excel and Word at the same time) then you'd be right back in the Macbook price range pretty quickly.