I'm a long-time Mac user who also happens to know PC's pretty well, having put together and configured dozens of them from scratch in the past. I've had lots of PC's and not one of them was ever a brand name but rather systems put together from scratch, including the installation and configuration of the OS, so I'm a pretty decent authority on both OS'es.
Macs have one big advantage over PC's that has made me switch all the computers in my house to Macs, including my Windows server hosting Exchange to Leopard server. That advantage is that the tools Apple provides for free for the purposes you use your computer for simply work and work well.
For instance, just in the last couple of weeks, I put together a DVD for my kids' dance studio for the annual Nutcracker production they do. With boatloads of video footage and thousands of photos, I used the tools Apple provides for free to make a professional-looking DVD. I used iMovie '09 to put together the footage I needed into a package, complete with chapter markers. I then exported the video to iDVD, selecting a nice theme that matched up perfectly with Nutcracker. iMovie also analyzed my video and removed the worst of video shake due to my lack of a useful tripod when taking the videos.
I then used Garageband to take some Tchaikovski music and edited it to create the music in the DVD menus, taking a little bit of Waltz of the Snowflakes for the top menu and Waltz of the Flowers for the scene selection menus.
I then used photos from Aperture (ok, that one's paid, but you could easily use the free iPhoto for this) and placed some of my best photos into the DVD menus. iDVD automatically created motion thumbnails for each chapter after importing from iMovie. After setting up the music, the photos, and doing some slight re-arranging, I burned the DVD to disk, which took about two hours to render and burn.
It came out beautifully and people at the dance studio have trouble believing it wasn't professionally done.
For those people out there who've used both Windows and Mac OS, raise your hand if you think Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player are as easy to use or as good as the stuff Apple provides. Yeah, didn't think I'd see too many hands.
BTW, you won't be able to find Windows 7 until late this year, or perhaps early next year since it's only just come out in a public beta form and Microsoft has not yet announced a release date. Before Windows 7 appears, Apple will have released Snow Leopard, an OS designed for multi-core and 64-bit performance rather than for features. I think some manufacturers are still providing Windows XP but by and large you will find Vista, a dog of an OS that even I uninstalled in disgust despite being a power user who loves to have the latest and sometimes-not-so-greatest. I do have Windows 7 running in a virtual machine on my main Mac desktop using a product called Parallels Desktop, which allows you to run a full-blown Windows setup on your Mac at very good speeds. For top Windows performance, Apple provides Boot Camp for free, allowing users to boot into Windows only.
A year ago, PC Magazine ran tests on what the fastest Windows machine was among laptops. The winner was... the MacBook Pro! Macs, which aren't optimized for Windows, can run Windows as well or better than the top PC's.
Security is also awesome. There are no known viruses on a Mac as of yet while only one or two known trojans exist in the wild. Trojans essentially trick you into installing a bad program by asking you to type in your admin password since they cannot crack the Unix security. Windows 7 is still built on the ancient Windows XP architecture and is just as vulnerable to viruses as its predecessors.
You said you're not IT illiterate, but hopefully I didn't give too techy an answer. I'm a software engineer so I have a habit of doing that sometimes.
