Apple makes better hardware than most of the PC manufacturers. The only mon-Mac laptops I like as hardware are the Lenovo T, W, and X series. I have some IBM/lenovo laptops too. Some of the Panasonic business-rugged laptops (W, T, S series) are also nice, but driver support is often weak.
Linux itself on laptops sucks more than on any other platform -- driver support, ACPI/APM support, etc. all suffer vs. Mac. OSX is a pretty decent Unix OS (although since I use ubuntu for most of my servers, the slight syntax variation vs. linux gets annoying). I also really like having Keynote, Pages, and Numbers available -- OpenOffice just doesn't do it for me. And, I use Adobe CS4 (mainly Illustrator and Photoshop). And for a gui text editor, TextMate is nice. And OmniGraffle.
Basically, Mac commercial software is a big plus, but fundamentally it's about having a great working Unix laptop which requires minimal tweaking out of the box.