Optical audio out? Yes. "Optical digital audio output" Has been for years. On sound? You seem to forget that Apple and Macs are the choice for professionals in video and audio mixing. It has all of that. Didn't you read that Wired Magazine stated that the 27" iMac supports over clocking to 4.0GHz??? Apple itself officially supports it to 3.46 Ghz.
USB ports? How many do you need built in? Why have a dedicated HDMI port? The Mini Display port supports it and is now an official standard port. The Mini Display port to HDMI cable sells for about the same as a good quality HDMI cable... so what's the point? The triple Channel DDR3 at 1600 is supported on the Mac Pros as are even faster and more powerful professional grade Xeon processors than the consumer grade i7s. PCIe slots. Had them for years on the Mac Pro.
Is your PC have all of its components inside an Aircraft Grade Aluminum machined uniblock Monitor sized case? Does it operate virtually silently? Does it take up minimal desk top space? Minimal cabling? No. Then it doesn't meet the challenge of meeting the specs.
And it doesn't run on a (mobile?) 4850...lol.
That ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics processor with 512MB of GDDR3 memory simultaneously supports the built-in 27" at 2560 by 1440 pixels and an external 30" at 2560 by 1600 pixel both with 16.7 million colors. It can easily handle the 1GB per second of video data flow demand and buffering that the two monitors require. That's more than adequate when combined with Apple's Core Graphics, Core Image, and Core Animations technologies.
My monitor is unbroken and doesn't flicker
The broken monitors and the flickering is being reported on a small number of shipped 27" iMacs. the vast majority are being delivered without incident or problem. The flicker is probably related to defective components considering the very small number of reports ... and the cracked screens most likely to mishandling given Apple's almost anal dedication to packaging design and testing. Those are problems that appear in almost any new product roll out and will be handled as Apple is handling them: replace the broken ones, and update/fix the issue with the flickering under warranty. WE could bring up the math errors in the Intel 286 processors of a couple of decades ago... remember those? What's an numerical error a few places to the right of the decimal point among friends?
The iMac's and your PC's Sales tax in California is irrelevant to the cost comparison. . . omit it from both. . . and the iMac's shipping is always free.
It is YOU who is claiming, against evidence, that an Intel i7 is a better processor than an Intel Xeon processor in the Mac Pro. Not me. It's you who tried to claim that virtual cores were the same as actual cores. You keep trying. I have not said that. Intel would disagree with you. There is a reason Intel differentiate their i7 and Xeon brands and charges more for the Xeon. There's a reason why the Xeon's use more expensive Buffered, error correcting RAM. The i7 is a intended to be a consumer grade DESKTOP processor. The Xeon is a professional grade, workstation class processor...
Just exactly what do you use your speed demon PC for, Joe? Gaming?
It carries audio. The equivalent on the Mac is a third-party cable that plugs into the Display Port and the audio out (or USB) and ends in an HDMI plug for the TV. It's the kind of hack you wouldn't expect to have to do on a Mac. If my Mac were plugged into my TV it would also be plugged into the stereo for the audio, so HDMI audio would be useless for me. Horses for courses.
Of course, I don't know anyone who even makes a 1600p TV yet, which is the equivalent resolution to 27" iMac. The reason for HDMI on a monitor these days is more for you to be able to plug your game console or DVR to your monitor and use it as a small TV. But you won't find a TV sold as a TV with 1600p that you can plug your computer into. That's probably because no TV is broadcast 1600p, no videos are delivered 1600p and no game consoles support 1600p. You won't get the equivalent picture on a TV that you do on a monitor until 1600p content becomes available.