Because Apple hardware is well-designed, and well put together.
Played with a Dell recently? Thick, heavy clunkers of machines with flimsy plastic flaps all over the place. Even the vaunted Lenovos have mushy keyboards and bits that just should not flex like that when pushed.
I'd gladly pay for Mac hardware and run some other OS on it - just the keyboard alone on the unibody is worth some money.
I see your point about Dell, but have you looked at other companies? Laptops by Asus are quite nice in terms of quality and are much less expensive. My point wasn't that Apple hardware is not well-designed and well put together -- it was that it wasn't really worth the cost difference (especially when you are choosing to not take advantage of a great operating system like OSX). There has got to be some other hardware out there that will make you happy.
I have a very recent vintage T400 - the keyboard is still mushy, and the casing still feels downright cheap and flimsy. There's simply no comparison - on the one hand you're building a machine out of plastic panels wrapped on a metal frame - on the other hand you're building a machine out of a one-piece aluminum construction.
I push on a unibody Mac keyboard - nothing flexes. It's rock solid. I push on a T400's keyboard, or bezel, or any body component that isn't supposed to twist and bend - and it does.
For me, it's this glass trackpad. No more carrying around mice! I picked up my mac primarily for that, but I've ended up doing the same thing the author did. The OS/X side of this computer just works. I need to boot up a VM and run Ubuntu 2-3 times a week, but the mac OS works all he time, and it's a (guilty) pleasure.
I recently bought a HP Envy 15. The design is clearly lifted directly from Apple and feels just as solid but the specs are much better than the equally priced MacBook Pro.
It's not just the keyboard. It's all the hardware. It's the keyboard, the various buttons, the speaker grilles, the indicator light, the camera... everything on the Macbook Pro is gorgeous, and it works all sleeklike.
The way this thread is playing out about hardware is the way this page/this situation/this argument is playing out with OS-X/Linux.
"Just use modwifi 0.9.4.1 I don't see why it's a problem you can find it with Google in a few seconds"
"It's not just the wifi, it's all the software. The audio stack, the BSD underpinnings, the coherent feel over many apps. I'd gladly pay more for things to just work, but it's not even that, things just work /nicely/."
The frustrating thing is that both viewpoints are valid, and there're people on both sides that don't seem to get that, and they're the only reason that people are getting into these arguments to begin with.
