At the very least this should be an optional default.

At least in Word 2007, it is. Second section in the advanced options is 'Cut, copy and paste', where you can set the formatting to match the document you're pasting it into.

OSX 10.4 is an antique - it's coming up to 8 years old. In any case, Ubuntu probably isn't the best distro for older hardware and the PowerPC version is only community release, not 'official' Ubuntu.

Also, Apple doesn't sell upgrades, they sell the actual OS for $20. So if you don't want to pay three times as much, you can skip as many upgrades as you want and the cost to get the latest version remains the same.

Apple's OS releases are by definition upgrades - (according to the licence) you can only install them on Apple hardware, and all Apple hardware is sold with a version of OS X preinstalled, so there is no real distinction between upgrades and full releases.

And that's a task that 95%+ of people will never use. The point of the ribbon is to give easier access the most commonly used options within the current context.

It's also £200 more than an identically configured Macbook Air.

99% of users have the OS bundled with their PC and don't see the cost of Windows, so it isn't a factor for them. Even if they did, the cost of an OEM licence to HP/Dell/etc is less than $50, not $120.

Ugh... except.

I pay the BBC licence fee for my mother (she is still in England, but I'm resident in the USA), so technically I am allowed to view content over iPlayer

Accept you're not. The licence is per household, so you're paying for your mother's licence for her house, if you live seperately from her then you'd still need your own licence.

£1.35/L (the average price here) is pretty much EUR 1.70/L

Electric: 0.09 euro/kWh, or about 0.025 euro/MJ

You're funny. In the UK, the absolute least you'll be paying is EUR 0.15/kWh, and the cost of electricity has increased 25% in 4 years.

A 'communist' OS (whose developers are paid by capitalist companies) in a 'communist' web browser (the development of which is funded by Google, a capitalist company).

Ugh. Their.

In the EU, the seller would charge the VAT rate of the country they operate out of - so there's only one rate to be concerned with. Also, I don't know whether this applies to other countries in the EU, but sellers only have to charge VAT when they're annual sales exceed ~£80,000 in the UK.

Someone else gets to take the financial risk?

They advertise one year 'complimentary support', as perfectly illustrated on their store pages for AppleCare.