I used to work at Apple, and when I did, I was a zealot. As a recovered Mac Zealot, let me tell you - the Mac has almost nothing on a PC. The only thing I can think of is the complete ease of hardware installation. There are no IRQ conflicts or DMA addressing issues to worry about. That and the fact that they finally shipped with Firewire.. which took them too long to release on their own machines (playing catch up to the PC world since Sony shipped with 1394 long before Apple did).
But, what you do get to worry about is the crash happy nature of the MacOS. If you've ever experienced those lovely bombs with error type 10 or 11, then you have experienced the crashiness of the MacOS. The Mac is still living in the past in so many ways.
The MacOS lacks protected memory, SMP (as does Win9x/ME), preemptive multitasking and the G3 has a subpar FPU that is taken from the 603 series (very bad). The G4 is better, but buying a dual CPU version is useless unless you plan on running OS X - which itself is bad due to it's slowness and completely different interface than the previos MacOS (it's NeXT - not BeOS, Macified). Anyhow, I'm just glad they are actually going to release MacOS X. After floundering with Copland, it's about time they released something modern.
The reason Macs didn't ship with Radeon's for so long is because ATI releasing some information early that they weren't supposed to. Mr. Calm and Rational, aka Steve Jobs, decided to get back at ATI by not announcing anything to do with the Radeon at Macworld and, from what I have heard, decided not to release Radeon's on Macs for quite some time as well. This is really rather unfortunate since the Radeon is sooo much better than outdated Rage Pro. But, leave it to the Macintosh world to play catch up.
If you really want a laptop, got for a PC laptop. It's a better investment, IMHO.