The love/hate relationship Slashdot has for Apple that's been going on since early 2000's is really fascinating. I think there is a bit of resentment from the rabid F/OSS crowd, to which I once belonged. These days I just can't bring myself to care that much about twisting my daily habits 5 different ways just for "The Cause." Above all I want shit that works. The option to spaz out in the command line is always couple of keystrokes away so I don't feel like I'm in the wilderness such as Windows where you have bolt-on idiotic things like cygwin or gui apache installers.
It doesn't help that lots and lots of alpha geeks jumped ship from Linux to OSX on a count of "it just works." For better or worse, it sort of exposed the glaring problems with blind "Open Über Alles" ideology and made the point that a bit of a benevolent dictatorship isn't that bad.
Hence you have this schism in geeklandia -- the "I just want the fucking thing to work so I can focus my efforts more efficiently" versus the "I want to control every aspect of my computing experience" purists. With the release of the iPad this rift is ever more pronounced.