apple only survived so far because their death would be bad for microsofts image as a killer monopole
And nothing at all to do with the fact that the world largest Apple software development house is ... Microsoft.
Why anyone who would run XP over OSX is beyond me.
I run both, I find XP is far more responsive and more versatile, OSX on the other hand is much easier to maintain and keep running smoothly. It's also safer browsing the web on OSX - although Safari is hideously unresponsive compared to Avante on XP, despite Safari being multi-threaded for dual cpu support (my work machine is dual cpu, it's still sluggish).
At the end of the day the G5 has just a SATA-1 interface (1.5gb/sec) versus my PC's SATA-2 interface (3gb/sec - although i've RAID0'd mine for 6). It has 533Mhz FSB, compared to my PC's 880Mhz. Sadly since OSX Mac software has become just as bloated as Windows software and in some cases really is just as slow as it's bloated relative.
OSX sits atop Unix, meaning that it's a bugger to fix properly. I've ended up reinstalling some Mac's at work when they go wrong, under OS9 I never had to do that. Under XP it's still quite rare for me to re-install, but now I gotta learn Unix aswell as OSX to repair machines in place without reinstalling... :(