My bias is always showing, I'm a pervert like that. But about the elitist image, you'd have to be part of that category to waste that much of your money on an electronic product way beyond its warranty period.

Basically though, the objective pros for owning a Mac disappear for > 95 % of the population if you remove the ones it shares with Linux (e.g. not Windows, low virus incidents, not having casual access to root). But if we go down that road, there are some major reasons to go with, let's say Ubuntu, over any of the Mac distributions (ahem, repository).

About the application sizes, I'm not sure if that's quite right. Windows uses DLL so that all the code doesn't have to sit in memory when an executable is loaded, and they are accessed as needed. From what I know about OS ecks, the programs are contained in .app file folders with all of those same components within. Comparing the installable file size for Firefox is bigger on OS ecks (13.3 MB for Win executable, 28.1 MB for dmg). When I browsed the dmg archive, I find a lot of dylib, which I would wager is the Mac equivalent of a DLL (dynamic library link).