[jtchang]

Price, flexibility, control are some of the top things that come to mind. Yes there can definitely be stability issues but if you are in some country where you want to develop iOS apps but can't really afford a high end Mac this makes sense. Also as a stepping stone into their ecosystem.

Also it is hard to underestimate the amount of polish that Apple puts into their UI. Overall it is a pretty good experience especially compared to some of the windowing systems on various flavors of linux. Polish is something that does not come easily in the open source world.