I don't recommend. I don't really. I tried, but I don't.

Coming from a long Linux history dating back to mid-nineties, I have used Macs for about three years. My first was a Powerbook P4 and now I've had my MacBookPro for about two years. Now my next laptop is going to be a Linux friendly non-Mac for running Ubuntu exclusively.

I liked the smoothness of OS X and how it all fits together. Then little irks surfaced: there's no decent system for installing/uninstalling applications, and absolutely nothing compared to apt in Ubuntu/Debian. Back to manual installations and manual upgrades. Ok, it was the Mac way and I adapted. Though, I started to avoid large software installations because upgrading turned out to be a real hassle. Uninstallation was different every time: it wasn't even as straight-forward as the ad hoc uninstaller mess in Windows. At least you can invoke that from one single place which helps in trying out applications.

DarwinPorts was easy but took forever to source-compile even the first installations of some essential applications, so I never upgraded them unless I had to. And I couldn't find everything I wanted from DarwinPorts. And it conflicted with some existing unix system software.

Luckily, I could build Emacs locally with --enable-carbon-app from CVS and at least the most important item in my toolchain worked pretty well, and looked nice.

Then various other limitations started to kick in. No decent terminal that could use the left Apple key as meta. Nothing major, but it really killed my thumb. Luckily I could configure carbon-Emacs to work like that so I started using terminals inside Emacs buffers... In a way I was in no way against that.

Eventually crappy window management started to stress me. I couldn't get my highly desired focus-follows-mouse from anywhere (or by installing any 3rd party utility!), or even keep certain windows on top while typing into a lower window. But I adapted and changed my working habits, trying to compromise with tricky virtual desktop configuration (with VirtuaDesktop or something).

Then utf-8 filenames between Linux and OS X turned out incompatible: Mac normalizes them and Linux doesn't. Boom, lots of problems with my version control running on a Linux server when filenames changed by themselves. I ended up renaming some of my essential files to plain ASCII, but I really didn't like the way where I was going.

And I don't even want to start with FileVault whose only purpose seemed to be corrupting my files and making logins take like half an hour after reboots. It may work for a few dozen Word documents and some configuration files but putting a heavy home directory of several gigabytes on it just doesn't work.

Eventually, the best desktop Unix didn't do unix for me well enough. I was basically having a huge hassle trying to run on OS X the applications I'd run on a Linux system. There was the desktop which was pretty worthless given that I couldn't run my stuff as easily as on Linux/X11. And try compile ogg123 on OS X! It worked on the P4 (Panther) but I never found a good binary nor working source code for MBP (Tiger). How's that relevant? The answer is cplay, the ultimate mp3+ogg+mod+sid player for any decent unix. Cplay is compatible with my directory-rather-than-id3-tag based music collection and it supports these exotic like playsid and mikmod players. I never got it fully working on OS X.

There was a pivotal issue, which I can't remember now, but which caused OS X to start sucking so badly that I installed Refit and put Ubuntu Dapper on my MBP at once. It had something to do with some bizarre software restrictions imposed by the OS X.

I had the usual hassle of configuring the Linux to work on the relatively alien Apple hardware but it took a day or two and then I had a Linux system that could hibernate and sleep just like OS X. I didn't compile a kernel for that, FYI. And at the same time I had all my good old applications working out of the box from Ubuntu's apt repositories. Installing the essential packages was a breeze and I got mostly the same desktop back that I had abandoned 2-3 years ago. System maintenance and hassle went immediately to zero. Filenames started working again, cross-installations. The unix had returned. Funnily enough, the same hardware has worked flawlessly for almost half a year now, running Linux. Sure, some parts don't work. Webcam - I don't need it. Most notably the fglrx driver sucks, failing at suspend/hibernate. I have to run Xorg with vesa and that doesn't give me 1440x900 but 1152x864, but it's still good enough.

As a reply to the OP: I don't know. Your mileage will vary: you won't miss out on the Mac unless you try it first. Then decide.