My wife spent an hour an a half waiting for a "genius" to do a 5 minute phone swap (LCD had cracked).
Ok, that's a long wait. The first time I read that I saw "half an hour". I've almost never seen lines that long and don't they let you make an appointment and at least go shopping elswhere if the lines are that long? How about this, I'll tell my genius bar story, I think it's basically the same story only I look at it the other way.
I bought a new MacBook online. When it arrived it didn't work, wouldn't even turn on. I called Apple's tech support and they had me bring it to the nearest Apple store, also they made an appointment for me. I went to the apple store, waited a few minutes for my 'Genius' who took one look at it and told me he had to swap out the RAM, which he did. Then I took my now working computer home.
Would I rather that my computer had worked in the first place? Yes. Have I spent hours on the phone with tech support from every other imaginable company where they did absolutely nothing to help without first having me do things like "unplug it and plug it back in"? Yes.
Y'know what, I have another story. A coworker of mine bought a laptop from Sony. When it showed up it the camera didn't work. Not the most important part in the world but it's nice to have your new thousand-dollar toy work out of the box. So she called Sony. I have no idea how long this took. In the end their solution was for her to ship the computer back to them so they could fix it. Remember how I live near an apple store? I also work near a SonyStyle store. Instead of doing the fix there, or replacing the computer as I suspect Apple would have done, they had her wait several weeks for the item she had just purchased. Could she have pushed them to replace the computer at their store? Probably, but it wasn't their first response.
What I'm not trying to say is that Apple is perfect, but they have a better commitment to helping solve customer problems then lots of other companies I've dealt with.
"I'm not getting a Mac laptop if I have to make an appointment to some pretentious technician for the simplest of problems".
I'm not sure what you expect to buy with such better support then. I'd rather wait 30 minutes to see a pretentious tech who can fix my problem than an hour for a phone support tech who spends three hours trying instruction manual fixes and can't.