If I didn't doubt Windows so much for programming stuff I'd really like to get one for university - looks like the perfect machine for lectures and also everything else I need a laptop for. For any students but CS I think it's awesome.
In my experience, I found that I was far more productive/successful in undergrad when I used Windows as my main OS and set up *nix virtual machines for the my computer science classes. Having the computer just _work_ and not needing to worry about software/configuration conflicts between classes was a huge improvement over trying to do everything inside of a single native OS.
That said, I now have a Macbook Pro and love that I have a native unix shell and MacPorts. But I still run virtual machines for specific projects (e.g. a Windows VM for all that software that just doesn't exist for OSX/Linux; unfortunately free alternatives don't work when you need to collaborate with a team).
Yep fair enough, Windows is a lot nicer to deal with but it just doesn't seem to have the same developer support. My alternative buy is definitely a Macbook but I do think the surface would be better for other student use cases - that said plenty of people on campus have Macbooks so it's not exactly a painful choice.
VMs are a good point and probably pretty much equalise things technically but OSX seems the better main OS for just doing work that happens to be programming/using developer tools etc.
