I have no real interest in convincing you or anyone else for that matter to switch to a Mac.

I'm just making the observation that people from the outside (including myself before I started using Mac), seem to gravitate to certain arguments that seem "obvious", like the cost, or that Apple attempts to "control" what users can do; which now in hindsight seem pretty irrelevant to me.

I know from experience that its next to impossible to describe to people the details of the benefits.

I have a very long list of small things that just make me smile. I can't speak to how relevant those things might be to you. Also, you might not ascribe a huge amount of value to any individual point (neither might I), but they certainly add up for me. And for a fact I know that anyone could say "well you could achieve pretty much anything on that list by just adding software xx to your Windows machine or by knowing about some <nonobvious> feature" -- but part of the point is precisely that I can do these things without spending time on googling / looking for / figuring out / configuring.

In other words - yes I can get stuff done faster because I can focus more on "stuff" and less on fighting with my machine.

For example:

1. My Mac laptop is the first machine I've ever owned that goes to sleep and wakes up properly. I almost never turn it off. Saves me tons of time as I can get working immediately.

1b. Your question about iWork: From time to time I suddenly have the need to do word processing that's more like "page layout" but not enough to warrant buying a "proper" tool for this (eg oftentimes this happens in the context of a technical report or proposal). Ever tried doing "page layout" in Word / OpenOffice? In Pages I can flow text automatically between boxes, position images precisely, even pull the background out of an image and flow the text around the "inside" part of the image, without fiddling around with frames, anchors etc.

2. I was recently playing with a VoIP wireless phone that supports limited options for wireless security. Every time I would switch a parameter on the AP (eg from TKIP to AES, or WPA-PSK2 to WPA-PSK), I would need to reconfigure the network connection on my wife's Windows laptop, while my Mac reconnected automatically.

3. I recently had to ferry my son about town and ended up having precisely 45 minutes to get work done stuck in a place I'd never been before. I connected my iPhone to my Mac, turned "internet tethering" on, and instantly could get working. Even though this was the first time I had ever tried doing that, I could actually use the full 45 minutes for work. I still recall the times I had done that with my previous set-ups, and vividly recall the wasted time figuring out how to get everything talking.

4. If I suddenly need to grab a screenshot of part of the screen, I just press shift-cmd-4.

5. If I need a calculator, I just press f4

6. If I connect a second screen, projector or whatever, sensible things tend to happen.

7. PDF production is a snap.

8. Any "color selection" dialog allows me to pick up a color from anywhere on the screen.

9. Multitouch scrolling saves a ton of time.

10. I have a real unix terminal available that understands sensible commands like ssh / ifconfig / python, again without having to lift a finger to install anything.

11. Once or twice I've needed to ssh -X to a remote machine, and again, it just works without any further installs required.

12. We were taking my son skating and a lady kindly agreed to snap a little video; only she ended up holding the camera in portrait mode. Correcting that with the built-in software was a breeze (further noting that at the time I had used Windows Movie Maker far more extensively than iMovie on the Mac)

13. When I get home I plug in my external harddrive (and that is it). Backups are seamless, and I never had to do much thinking or configuring.

etc etc. I could go on and on but frankly I don't have the time. And I know from experience the type of response to this: "yes, but..." I used to be precisely the same way when arguing with my Mac-adherent colleagues. Today,given the choice between a $0 PC and a $3000 Mac Laptop, 9 times out of 10 I would opt to pay for the Mac.

(I should also note that I do a ton of embedded linux work, so I spend a lot of time inside linux; these days my preferred environment for this is inside VirtualBox on my Mac laptop).