Personally I'd advise anyone who isn't a tecchie to try a mac over windows any day, mac has the advantages of a UNIX/Linux/BSD type OS over windows without the hassle of knowing UNIX/Linux. Personally I run Linux because I know UNIX really well, I can do anything that people on a mac can do about 10 times faster* so probably 50 times faster than Windows users. Even my window manager of choice hasn't really changed code wise in 15+ years so imagine how the extra computer BHP we've gained since then has improved things for me rather than just being able to cope with the latest version of ? OS.
*excluding the OSX users that know the command line well I suppose.