You can actually get a wide-screen Dell Precision M90 with a free 19" external flat-panel monitor, for less than the Mac Book Pro.
Now, there are other reasons to buy the Mac, obviously. If you want to use Mac OS X, you have no other choice. And, for some people, that makes it worth the price.
But, I think it's dishonest to pretend that Macs are price-competitive with even Dells at this point.
I agree on that.
They only manage to get the Dell anywhere near the price of the MacBook by loading it up with all sorts of useless and expensive stuff (Wordperfect? MusicMatch?).
Looking at the list of stuff, you could get something that would nearly match the performance of the MacBook for about half the price. You could get a near-perfect hardware match for $600ish less.
Indeed, looking at the site, for $2800 I put together a 17" Core Duo Notebook at 2.16 GhZ with two Gigs of RAM, an 80 Gig SATA 7200 RPM Hard Drive (you'd be surprised at the difference it makes), and the like.
No, it is dishonest to compare items that are not equivalent.
The starting Dell Dimension M90 (1.67GHz, $2064) does not come close to the specs of the MacBook Pro (2.16Ghz, $2799). In fact, even the Enhanced M90 model (still 1.6GHz, $2222) does not match the specs on the Mac.
Dell lets you customize so we can come close. Matching the specs brings the price of the Dell Dimension M90 price to $3098.... and that is not even adding ANY software at all. of course that extra $299 probably pays for that "free" 19" Monitor.
The MacBook Pro is still just $2799... and comes with all that software... and will also boot into Windows.
Not one up to the Mac's specs. With the exception of the question of graphics (the M90 is a workstation replacement so comes with a Quadro, so is really in a different class of notebooks), just getting the processor, memory and optical drive up to the Mac's specs takes you to over $100 more than the Mac, and you get your memory with two DIMMs (the Mac uses one standard). That also includes Dell's current sale, which knocked almost $200 off the Dell's price.