The software (free in that it was included in the price of my burner) that I have to burn DVDs does do all that stuff. I don't use animated menus, though. I think they're distracting and unnecessary. I haven't tried any of the truly free DVD authoring packages, but I know that they are available on SourceForge (whether any are available for Windows, I don't know).

I'm curious how they define "world-wide helpdesk". Are there support teams on-site? Who does the hardware support? That's something that is almost always included in a PC helpdesk environment. Do the employees ship their computer to a hardware support team? It'd doubtful. My point is that While the support teams may be smaller, I think the number you gave is probably deceiving. Also, you specified "in-house". Do they outsource this to some degree?

eMacs and the Mac Mini may have lower power consumption, but bear in mind that I was comparing computational power. An eMac still isn't as fast as the two year old laptop that I use at work. That's another problem... most of our faculty use laptops. Commercial grade Mac laptops are far more expensive (especially when you take support into account) than our high-end Dell laptops. Through Dell, we have in-house certified technicians who can support hardware (as well as being skilled at supporting the software used on campus). We approached Apple about doing this sort of thing and found that they also offer a similar program...if you own 300 Macintosh computers. That is simply impossible for an institution of our size, even if we bought the cheap, slower eMacs. Apparently owning fewer than 300 puts you into "treat you like crap" category because every experience we've had with their sales and support has been very negative and more costly than most of our experiences with Dell. I know that this sort of treatment isn't isolated to us.

You say that the intent of Macs is "to allow people to be creative." If you're talking about artistically creative, I think you'll find that most people are incapable or uninterested in this. I do a very small amount of graphical design for my job (which I do very easily in Macromedia Fireworks). Most of my creativity comes in web application development. This coding is done entirely in text editors. No computer system in the world has a monopoly on that. In the end, I've started using WinSCP and Notepad2, two extremely user friendly open source projects, to do all of my development. Like I've said, for some people, Macs are very useful, but they aren't the end-all, be-all of computers.

I have found that no matter what OS someone is running, they'll find ways to screw their computer up. If they can't do it easily by installing tons of spyware then they'll push it off a piano before setting a chair on it. (Actual conversation: "How did it get somewhere someone could put a chair on it?" "I put it on the floor so it wouldn't fall off the piano"). Most of the Mac users I've known are just as incapable of being responsible computer users as Windows users.

By the way, thank you for the reference. I always like to keep things scholarly ;)