Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

I would say you want a mac except that the warranty may be more restrictive than you want. In my experience Apple tends to be fairly whiny abour repairing things that are obviously your fault. That said, if they do repair your machine they tend to be fairly fast and correct about it and I don't hear stories about them losing your box for months and then replacing the wrong thing, unlike say Dell. If you do decide to get a mac you probably won't have any compatibility problems and those can probably be fixed by dual booting windows once a month.