alt Hacker NewsGeorge is probably too young to remember when we thought OS X was hot shit because it was UNIX compliant. That meant a lot back then.
However over the years they dropped the ball big time. Arch may be the new hotness but BSD was the once (and hopefully future) king.
Having an iBook or a PowerBook with Mac OS X was a big deal at a time when driver support for Linux was less commonplace than it is today. Even today there are driver issues with Linux on some laptops.
Part of the reason I bought a Core Duo MacBook the summer after my freshman year of college was because Apple was the only vendor I knew where I could purchase a fully-supported Unix laptop. It could also run Microsoft Office without having to dual-boot with Windows, though ironically I ended up just using NeoOffice (a Mac fork of OpenOffice), the Apple iWork suite, and LaTeX during my college years.