I loved OS X on my MacBook but I wanted more power and a larger screen, and I couldn't afford a Mac Pro.
Compared to both Windows and Linux, I preferred OS X's behavior in:
- the systemwide emacs keybindings in every textbox
- the consistent keyboard shortcuts (Cmd+C was always Copy, Ctrl+C was always Interrupt)
- the dedicated keyboard key (Option) for typing non-ASCII characters
- the general higher quality of apps that were available (Transmit was a better FTP client, TotalTerminal a better terminal, Preview a better PDF viewer, iBooks a better ebook reader, MplayerX a better video player, iTunes a better music player, Adium a better chat app, Transmission a better torrent app, Parallels a better VM, than anything for Windows or Linux)
- the consistent look-and-feel of apps
- the centralized notification system, Growl (before any OS had built-in notification support, the third-party Growl library was the de-facto standard on Mac, at a time when in other OSes, every app used their own notifications that constantly got in each other's way)
- QuickLook
Compared to Windows, I liked:
- the presence of a bash terminal underlying everything
- multiple desktops (Windows has this now, but didn't back then)
- Exposé (the thing that showed all open windows so you could click the one you wanted to easily switch to it)
Compared to Linux, I liked:
- Homebrew, a package manager which actually installed up-to-date packages instead of years-old packages (this was before Linuxbrew)
- official support for various paid apps like Photoshop and MS Word
- the ability to do many important things in a GUI (and therefore, the ability to do new things without needing to Google them)
Aside from the complications updates posed, I ran into no major problems with the hackintosh setup, other than I think the microphone didn't work? Everything else worked fine. I had overall much fewer problems than I have with Linux.