Something you could set the record straight for me on is just how much RAM does OS X like to have so the OS isn't paging to the hard drive all of the time..
256MB. But that's with the whole whazzam of the Quartz graphics engine on the desktop. Still it's not slow and multitasking works just great. A little application can turn of all the eyecandy (like the shadows etc) and then you are down on memory usage under 100MB.
But different to lets say a Windows machine, adding memory to a mac actually speed things up drastically. I could barely run UnrealTournament 2004, Neverwinter nights (with all expansions) and Warcraft III on my iBook G4/800, but after plunking in a stick of 512MB RAM all of those games are VERY playable. And all are run on a 800MHz processor and one "crappy" 9200 card with 32MB RAM.
What you fail to see is that OS X doesn't do things the way Windows does, and thus can run 3D games at lower specced hardware, and ofcourse on PPC.
So don't be so quick to bash the hardware, don't underestimate what these machines can do before you've tried them out thoroughly yourself.
