The car analogy may not be perfect, but still, a Hackintosh requires work. I would never give it to a friend to use, as YOU become customer support when it breaks. For many people, the entire point of a Mac is to shove customer support to someone else so it saves you (the friend) a bunch of time from troubleshooting stuff over the phone/in person.
It's just a difference in outlook. I think the term 'Hackintosh' baffles some people because they assume we're talking about some strange hybrid hardware that's a 'Hackintosh' and only that. But it's just a custom-built PC. There's an entire industry built around the fact that many of us (especially us tech-heads) would rather build a PC ourselves than buy a lesser system from Dell or HP, and yes even Apple. Their name on a case that contains the same parts (and actually most times lesser) and components that I can buy myself doesn't mean anything to me. It's why you can buy all the parts individually in the first place.
The *only* difference between building a PC for someone and building a 'Hackintosh' is that the later has at least one additional hard drive with MacOSX installed. That's it. No other difference. It's not some special breed of hardware. It's a PC with at least one copy of OSX installed on it. Most people tech people probably don't believe it's any big deal to build a custom HTPC or gaming PC for a friend, but then they panic at the sound of 'Hackintosh' when really it's the same thing with an additional OS installed.
Contrary to popular myth, OSX won't just break itself automagically every other minute because its running on non-Apple hardware. OSX is actually a much more resilient OS than even Windows- once it's installed and working, it pretty much works. It doesn't just "go bad" the way Windows sometimes can. As for doing any 'work' to keep my Hack running, I can't really recall any in years beyond what's been described for updates, and keeping clone backups, which really Carbon Copy Cloner does automatically.
So as for building for someone, the real work involved is in choosing the right hardware, and installing OSX properly. After that point, it's a total myth (mostly continued out of axe-grind agendas and FUD) that there's all kinds of 'work' involved to keep OSX running. There really isn't- if it works, it generally tends to stay working, if it's stable, it's stable.
I once built a Hack for a friend's company running Leopard- I came back and visited after two years and found that same machine STILL RUNNING, still doing it's job- and when I say still running, I mean it had not once been turned off in two years! That's how stable OSX actually is. By the way, though it's been turned off (and OS upgraded) since that time, that same machine is still going. As are dozens of others I've built for people.
As has been said, if you choose the right hardware (critical) there will be support for it from others using the same, and the procedure to update is the same as outlined. There isn't necessarily any other work involved unless for whatever reason someone is always tinkering and screwing with their system, or purposefully trying to break things to prove their own FUD to themselves.
