A Question Rival to The Meaning of Life

So as you already know James, I'm planning on getting a laptop for a bit of a Christmas gift. It would be the kind of thing where I would pay for most of it and the parents would chip in a little, so that's quite nice on the bank account. And now we come to the big question, to get a PC or a mac? I can tell now that I won't be doing any, or almost any, gaming on it, so that problem is out of the way. I've heard good things about the mac as long as you're doing anything apart from gaming, and I would be using it for word, excel and possibly PowerPoint mostly, apart from general usage. I'm not familiar with the inner workings of a mac, so that might take some getting used to, but that shouldn't be much of a dilemma. They might be a little bit slower than a PC, but I'm not buying a laptop for hair raising speed, otherwise I'd go for the enormously expensive Dell XPS (which I customized one on the internet just for fun, total is $4 855) and even then a desktop would beat that at half the price. Anywho, if there's anything I've missed in this small discussion, please feel free to add in. As for now I'm interested in learning a little more bout the mac. Hope this doesn't spark too much controversy.