Crystall: I think that 'responsivness' is a highly sujective measure. I find MacOS X 10.2/10.3 pretty zippy on my Dual 1GHz, earlier version looked too slow to me.
Then again, the store might have turn on every graphics feature possible to make it look cool. I don't know what kind of options OSX has (like XP), to turn off the eye candy. All I can say is that it was rediculously slow on a Dual G5, and that turned me off right away.
Nothing starts faster than AmigaOS 3.1 from a crachety old 40MBer. 
Well, the less hardware you have to initialize and diagnose on startup, the faster it boots. Nothing boots faster than MS-DOS! ;-)
XDelusion: YOu know, from reading what half you guys are typing about this Zippy OS business, it is REALLY hard to believe any of you ever owned an Amiga.
Yeah, just like those who say XP or Macs are slow have never used one. I have an Amiga 1200 and several PC's at home, and used Macs all the time in school and work, and used to be a Mac sysadmin. The Amiga is the most responsive machine I've ever used, but only if you run it in a 640x256 Workbench in no more than 8 colors, and don't switch between apps too often. A barage of crashes doesn't help, either. ;-)
I have so many horrible memories of MacOS 8-9, I can't forgive Apple no matter how good OSX is. My dad has XP and I run Win2K, and I simply refuse to upgrade. XP is too damn cluttered and slow. Every OS has its shortcomings.
Every Ati All In Wonder I have ever owned has sucked, has not worked, or just gave bad quality or corrupted videos. I hope the world of the Mac is better for this.
Early ATI hardware was notorious for bugs and a lack of screenmodes. Later on, it was only the drivers that sucked. Today's ATI hardware and drivers are very stable. I can't say anything about movie capture, though.
McNorris: But Damn! My buddy bought a New Sony Vaio w/ a 2.6Ghz P4 and XP feels just as peppy on my Dell w/ a PIII 800Mhz.
The Vaio laptops don't seem very impressive to me. My boss had one and it was a terrible machine to work on (uninstalling registry keys for Comcast tech support took about 20 minutes, about 40 mintues total).
Personally, I think most laptops are full of mismatched hardware. I've never worked on one that seemed even the least bit usable, boot in less than four minutes, and even came CLOSE to a desktop. Or maybe all my friends/bosses didn't know beans about selecting hardware.
