Mac - worth it?

[questio verum]

That is correct. There's technically nothing stopping you from running MS Windows on current (Intel) Mac hardware. It will work, and all the software designed for Windows will work in that environment. Apple even makes it easier to do with a utility called Boot Camp, which will partition your drive for you and write a driver disk for Windows. I've done this myself before and seen it done a number of times.

I'm not a regular Mac user, I just dink around with them sometimes when hanging out with one of my Mac friends. But doesn't the firmware prevent direct loading of windows without Boot Camp or one of the other boot managers? Or did Apple '86' those restrictions?

qv

[Rubberman]

You can either run the Windows apps in Windows natively (boot-camp dual-boots the system with OSX and Windows, providing drivers for Windows that optimize it for the Apple hardware), or in a Windows virtual machine. I don't know if Wine runs under OSX or not, but that's also a possibility. In any case, you cannot run the Windows application directly in OSX, AFAIK.

[techieMoe]

I'm not a regular Mac user, I just dink around with them sometimes when hanging out with one of my Mac friends. But doesn't the firmware prevent direct loading of windows without Boot Camp or one of the other boot managers? Or did Apple '86' those restrictions?

qv

I don't believe it's the firmware that will give you trouble, it's the BIOS. Or rather, the lack of BIOS. Intel Macs are the first consumer-level computers I'm aware of to implement the new EFI boot process, which is intended to replace BIOS completely. To run Linux on my Macbook Pro I had to set up a third-party bootloader called rEFIt, which would allow me to dual or triple boot OS X, Windows, or Linux.

Now, there is a firmware limit for installing OS X on non-Apple hardware from what I understand, but not the other way around.