Admittedly the parent post is somewhat fanboyish, but it's true that the macbook (and imac) sleep functions are light years ahead of most PC laptops. They sleep very quickly on closing the lid, and resume fast too... I've never found sleep to be as effective on Dells given to me by work.
Avoiding reboots in definitely preferred. I've heard very good things about Mac's sleep speeds, but I have a home built PC and Lenovo ThinkPad that do ok. They take around 5-10 seconds to go from in or out of sleep which is fast enough that I don't think about it and I usually only reboot to install Microsoft Updates, which is a different story.