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I've had a Mac since OSX version 1. There are a couple of reasons people don't complain about the Mac OS price. First, it doesn't hurt to skip a generation or two. One of my daughters is on 10.3, and the other is on 10.2. I was on 10.2, but upgraded to 10.4. Mac still supports all the systems with security updates, etc.

The other thing is that when you spend the $130 for the Mac upgrade, it's a complete system upgrade. You don't have to already have Mac 10.3 to install Mac 10.4. You can install the new operating system over the old one and keep all your settings, programs and files, or you can format the drive and do a completely clean install. It never checks to see if you have a previous version. Finally, to get a fully functional copy of Windows Vista, you have to shell out $400 (that's retail, and there will probably be some pricing discounts), but that's still a lot of dollars. For $200, you can buy a family license for OSX, and completely upgrade five Macs, with no requirements for previous versions, etc, for $200. That's half the retail price of one fully functional copy of Vista, and there aren't the myriad "Windows rules" in the Eula. Basically, you agree to not reverse engineer the OS or run it on more machines than the license allows. Other than that, if the OS is capable of it, you can do it. There's no "don't run the system in a virtual machine unless you pay for the full version and even if you pay for the full version, don't run DRM content on the virtual machine" caveats.