The benefit of Macs is that they're high-end unix workstations optimized for usability. As far as I know Apple is the only company still making anything by that description.
I do not find Macs to be very "usable", and previous-gen ThinkPads outranked them in everything but the shiny-showing-off-at-starbucks metric. However, in the last generations, Lenovo has nerfed the ThinkPads (new ones don't even have a middle mouse area - no more buttons, either).
They've also even put the logo upside down so that you can show it off at cafes.
Is there a Thinkpad model you would recommend for day-to-day use (mainly Java programming and LaTeX writing), that is light enough to be carried around daily?
Ihe UX of OSX is not that of a high end unix workstation. High end unix workstations do not need homebrew. High end unix workstations do not provide the miserable, second class Xwindows experience that is found on OSX.
So I used "high end unix workstations" for years and years and years and OSX isn't perfect, but jesus christ I'd take its UI over just about any of the UIs from its competitors.
(and remember trying to compile anything on sunos and only having suncc? fuck that, imo, I'll deal with xcode)
The X Windows experience on my MacBook Pro is great! I get a OS that does pretty much everything my ThinkPad with Linux did, plus:
* wifi works out of the box and reconnects practically instantly out of sleep [1]
* sleep works without me spending two weeks recompiling Gentoo with different kernel options and finally discovering some boot flag that worked until Ubuntu broke it in one of their updates
* I don't need to edit my XF86Config file (maybe not necessary any more)
* no hassle of getting a compositing window manager working (hopefully compiz/emerald works better now than in 2008), figuring out how to disable gdm/kdm because the window manager options with the distribution are always terrible so I just start from .xinitrc because figuring out how to get gdm/kdm/xdm to run what I want seems to change every time I have to look.
* no more poor battery life
* filtering through low quality apps (KDE: crash-happy and UgLy), GNOME: pretty but light on the features); still scarred over X-CD-Roast...
* AirDrop!
* no arcane errors about sound because Ubuntu suddenly decided that I needed Jack (or maybe it was the other one), when ALSA was working just fine
* oh, yeah, whenever I need to run an XWindows program it integrates seamlessly into my other programs. So much so that I tend to forget to use Ctrl for the keyboard shortcuts instead of that Apple command key with the weird symbol on it. It even seems to cut and paste from the rest of the system reasonably well.
Yeah, I'm totally loving the XWindows experience on MacOS X!
[1] I switched to Ubuntu because wifi and sleep just worked, and then they just didn't work after some updates