For me it's the other way around. I like the MacBook hardware a lot but I'm not so happy with Mac OS.
Mac OS memory management is awful compared to Linux or Windows and makes the entire system feel sluggish. Safari keeps crashing. Spaces is broken. Not being able to maximise windows is annoying. Transparent menus are hard to read (what am I supposed to see behind them anyway?).
There are a lot of positives as well, but all being said, I'm not going to pay that premium next time.
You can disable the translucent menubar. Just uncheck the box in Desktop & Screensaver's prefpane. Spaces can be disabled as well (in the Expose & Spaces prefpane) so you can use Virtue instead for virtual deesktops.
Also, Safari's been stable for me (except on delicious2.0 for some reason, but I dont use delicious often). But thats just one piece of data, not really enough to make any sort of conclusion.
I have disabled the translucent menubar. But you cannot disable the translucent menus. I have disabled Spaces because it breaks Cmd+Tab switching but I would like to use it if it actually worked.
You can easily install Linux on Apple hardware. There are detailed instructions somewhere on the web. I'm writing these words from a Mac Mini with Ubuntu. I used to use Mac OS X as my primary system for a long time before and my experience was good. On OS X you can have most of the things you have on Linux, but some things require much more effort to set up and some don't work. The fonts look much nicer on OS X.
I'm considering to do that. It's just that last time I looked the atheros wifi chipset wasn't supported by Linux out of the box and I was simply too lazy to mess with drivers again.
Mac OS memory management is awful compared to Linux or Windows and makes the entire system feel sluggish. Safari keeps crashing. Spaces is broken. Not being able to maximise windows is annoying. Transparent menus are hard to read (what am I supposed to see behind them anyway?).
There are a lot of positives as well, but all being said, I'm not going to pay that premium next time.