".... they are the most network unfriendly computers I've ever worked with."
Like this unfriendly - so gol-durn unfriendly that an 11 year old girl can set up a network?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1410181/posts
"Like its sibling Mac OS X desktop version, Mac OS X Server provides a UNIX desktop environment that is trivially easy to install and configure. To measure Tiger Server’s ease of use, I tested my eleven-year old daughter’s (Tess) ability to install and configure the OS on bare-metal. Granted, she’s a bright eleven-year-old with daily experience on a Mac OS X desktop machine, but she has had no prior experience using the server software. I gave her the installation DVD and provided network and power to a computer with an erased hard drive. The only instruction she was given was 'Whenever in doubt, accept the defaults.'"
"She clicked the installer icon that rebooted the machine from the DVD, and after following the simple on-screen prompts, with a few button clicks the OS was installed on the local disk in 16 minutes. The machine rebooted from the freshly installed local disk, and after responding to a few more simple prompts, in 11 minutes she had configured the machine as a gateway with DHCP, DNS, a shared file system, shared directory services, and a load management system (Xgrid) served to the internal private network, as well as Apache web services and IMAP, POP and SMTP mail services to the external network, with Network Address Translation and a Firewall configured to permit all internal network traffic out, but only Secure Shell network traffic in.
"Following this she created a user account and home directory for me. Did she know what she was doing? Very likely no, but the point is that she didn’t have to. I suspect the biologists out there tasked with the new UNIX Systems Administration responsibilities will appreciate this too."
I must disagree with you most strenuously. I have never had a problem making my G4 Powerbook work with the all-PC network at my office, nor have I had any problems with my all-Mac network at home. I have, however, had problems getting a PC to work with my Macs. For that matter, I've had difficulty getting a PC to work with other PCs in a network. Job security for the IT guys, I guess.
I strongly disagree. For the vast majority of computer users, Mac OS X is more network friendly. Apple's XServe is probably the easiest network server to configure and operate on the market.
The only thing Windows is more "friendly" about is spreading network worms, viruses and spyware. For the authors of that crap, Windows is their friend.
Appletalk was aweful but thats gone now, osx is as network and user friendly (if not more) than windows. I use both quite a bit...