This. A million times this.

I work a small startup MSP maintaining the networks for several small businesses. There are two of us. My average work day will have me dealing with everything from Exchange 2003 on Server '03 up to everything on an SBS 2011, with SQL, Sharepoint, and about 30 client specific apps (medical, CRMs, etc) in between. I honestly don't have the time to memorize Powershell. I know it's important, and it's something I'm working on, but when I sit down at the first machine running Exchange '07 that I've seen in 4 months, I don't have time to remember which cmdlets exist and what they are and how to syntax them, so I just open the GUI and hope I can get what I need done without googling the shell commands.

Is this ideal? No. Is it practical? Absolutely.

Yeah but we're talking about the server market, not the desktop market. In a consumer workstation it may be impossible to buy a blank machine, but it's very easy to do in the server market.

You weren't paying for a me.com e-mail address, but rather for webhosting, idisk, and basically all of the other stuff that's now free in iCloud, and the me.com e-mail address came along with it.

While that's legitimate, this is unfortunately become par for the course with nearly all ARM platforms it seems (See: Android phones with locked boot loaders, iOS devices, etc)

Well, duh. The whole idea of Secure Boot is to prevent malware from compromising your boot loader. How? By preventing software from interfering.

Honestly, anyone loading Linux themselves should be more than capable of going into the UEFI setup and flipping it to off. If they're not, then god help them when they try to actually install Linux (and find drivers, etc).

Except they can just turn off SecureBoot

As posted above, from: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/windows/hardware/jj128256

  Mandatory. Enable/Disable Secure Boot. On non-ARM systems, it is required to implement the ability to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup. A physically present user must be allowed to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup without possession of PKpriv. A Windows Server may also disable Secure Boot remotely using a strongly authenticated (preferably public-key based) out-of-band management connection, such as to a baseboard management controller or service processor. Programmatic disabling of Secure Boot either during Boot Services or after exiting EFI Boot Services MUST NOT be possible. Disabling Secure Boot must not be possible on ARM systems.

Do your research before you condemn, please.

As posted above by an Anon, from: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/windows/hardware/jj128256

  Mandatory. Enable/Disable Secure Boot. On non-ARM systems, it is required to implement the ability to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup. A physically present user must be allowed to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup without possession of PKpriv. A Windows Server may also disable Secure Boot remotely using a strongly authenticated (preferably public-key based) out-of-band management connection, such as to a baseboard management controller or service processor. Programmatic disabling of Secure Boot either during Boot Services or after exiting EFI Boot Services MUST NOT be possible. Disabling Secure Boot must not be possible on ARM systems.

I don't think there's much to have "play out." Just turn it off if you don't like it.

Nah, it's Adobe's fault that Adobe made he spend several thousand dollars. Apple said "hey this is going away" a long time ago, and Adobe said "well when it does, people will just buy the new one!"

Also, I fail to understand why upgrading to Lion (which worked on the existing hardware) forced her to buy new hardware (which came with Lion)?

I'm not 100% sure, but I think the video card requirement is about OpenCL. AFAIK the video card cutoff is at the OpenCL compatibility line.

+1. I put Mountain Lion on both my Macbook Pro and iMac, both mid 2007 models. That's 5 years old. I spent under $1000 for both of them combined.

Streaming to a TV via HDMI is achievable via a dongle. Not as elegant to be sure (and not discounting your point, just clarifying a detail) but it is possible.

I don't think there's a software warranty on a machine even with the factory load, is there?

For reference, I use Safari on OSX for little more than watching youtube videos and light web browsing (this site, XKCD, Anandtech, etc) and the memory usage blows up over time. I've found through Activity Monitor that's it's really the flash plugin. It appears that it never gives back the RAM it takes until I close Safari (or force quit the plugin, but then I have no Flash until I reboot Safari).

That, combined with the fact that I have occasional stutters playing back an HD Flash video with a 2.8GHz C2D and 3GB of RAM makes me unsurprised that Apple hates Adobe and all things Flash.

Calling an i5 a desktop chip and an Atom the mobile chip is fairly inaccurate. Intel has a whole line of mobile Core i parts that are much lower power than their desktop variants. This isn't the old days of shoving Pentium 4s into laptops, and an Atom is NOT a good choice for a full size laptop (nor is it anywhere close to a Turion in performance), being designed for netbooks.