You can't go wrong with a Thinkpad, in fact, I wouldn't use any other laptop if it came free. I ran thinkpads exclusively for the last 10 years. My last desktop machine had an AMD Duron and 256 megs, that's long ago it was.
They're not the most good looking, but they're rugged and functional as hell. A Thinkpad looks the same after 5 years, most others peel and scratch. When I was backpacking, my road-mate had his macbook come apart .. literally, the case feel out of the bottom and the top came apart. Mine? I threw it into truck beds, buses, ferries, sat on it, slept on it, and it endured everything including the humidity in the Mekong and freezing weather in north-east China, not to mention power surges.
T410 here, after a long stint with a T41. It's a solid, solid machine.
And it has channels in it that will drain liquids spilled on it away from components and through little holes in the body! I have not, and do not intend to test this.
You cannot go wrong with a Thinkpad, but you can do better, IMHO.
I enjoyed my last Thinkpad (t40) a lot. Still have and use it after 6 years. But especially with linux, battery life wasn't very good (now the battery is completely dead of course). The fan never stopped.
To answer the question of the OP: yes, it is totally worth to learn Mac OS. First, the effort is small. Second, you will save a lot of admin time. Third, backup is easy, reliable and bootable. This alone recommends Macs as developer notebooks.
Earlier power-saving technologies were pretty proprietary from what I recall; there was "pre-ACPI" and also a fairly substantial period of "ACPI that still only worked through Windows because Windows could tolerate a lot of errors in the ACPI tables where Linux actually believed the tables". Now most of them are through standardized interfaces and work in Linux just fine.
But - no offense meant - this is the standard answer, if something does not work. Just upgrade. You do that 20 times, and then you get something that works now, and not after the next upgrade.
For Linux, I personally separate the issues into two issues: "Hardware support is possible but doesn't exist", and "hardware support is impossible because the hardware vendor or standards bodies are either withholding documentation, failed to follow their own standards, or in some cases even actively fighting Linux developers". The "ACPI that only works in Windows" spent quite a lot of time in the latter case. If you had an IBM laptop that is now 6 years old, it probably fell into that category, based on the timing.
(A surprising amount of hardware fails to follow standards. I have a hard time laying the blame on Linux when that happens. I realize that as a user you may not care, but assigning blame to the proper entities is important if you want it to be fixed; cussing out Linus when in fact the hardware vendors are deliberately withholding specs may feel good but is not productive otherwise.)
Unfortunately "just fine" isn't nearly as fine as Windows or OS X. It just gets hotter and drains the battery faster. That's my only gripe left with Linux hardware support on my current laptops.
The battery part is actually true, but I thought it was only me because I use older TP models.
My girlfriend's HP gets at least half a day. I don't think she even bothers to charge it during the day.
But hers is a crap laptop with lousy, fragile keys; short screen (WTF IS THAT?) that's twice as wide than it's tall, and sucks for everything but listening to music.
I loved my T41p. It was so pleasant to use that it became my main workstation. Unfortunately, the battery stopped holding a decent charge and the fan stopped completely. Since Macs were growing in popularity, I needed one for testing, so I made the switch to a 17" MBP. It was rough at first (I really miss the pointing stick, extra trackpad buttons, and the incredible range of the hinge on the T41p), but after three years, I'm still impressed by the design and quality of the MBP. Most other laptops seem old and clunky by comparison. As for Linux development, VMWare or VirtualBox allow you to run multiple distributions and you can back up images for easy restoration. As for common open source tools on the Mac itself, MacPorts has the essentials and more.
I was a TrackPoint junkie until I got myself a unibody Macbook Pro. That was the first trackpad I actively enjoyed using, and now I honestly wouldn’t want to go back.
Actually, it is the power management.
Most likely it can be configured. But that is one of the points (admin time): you have to configure it. On Macs, it works.
Not really. Most of it is lack of proper power management in the drivers, especially graphic drivers. Work is ongoing, things will improve. In a few years.
I have only about 2--2.5 hours of battery life in my T61 under Ubuntu (standard 6-cell battery, 3 years old). Luckily that's sufficient for my needs.
I just bought a ThinkPad T510. What caused me to convert was the advertised EIGHT HOUR battery life. Yes, it's true. Under moderate load you can expect to get maybe six or seven; under heavy load maybe four. But that's not bad. Better than many netbooks and this is a full-sized laptop.
One data point: running Ubuntu on my T510 I don't get anywhere near eight hours with the standard battery - at least not with wifi on. However, I haven't done any battery life tweaking (powertop etc), and it probably doesn't help that I have the higher-res 1920x1080 screen (which I assume chews up battery, but I wouldn't give up for anything).
However, I got the backup battery as well (it plugs in over the top of the normal battery) - it pretty much triples the battery life. It's heavy as hell, but if you're going to be in one place for a while (at home, on a long-haul flight, etc) that's not a problem.
Arch Linux, no desktop (just a bare window manager with xterms, emacs, and stuff), and I turned the screen brightness down to the lowest comfortable level.
My MBP went through the window of my car when I rolled it 4 times. Still works great.
One thing people say about Apple products is you pay a premium for the same hardware. I was talking to a friend and told him about a few unique bits of Apple Hardware.
1) The touchpad. There's a reason people now use the Apple Touchpad on desktops. It works really well.
2) Battery Life. I frequently sit through 5-6 hours of class on a single battery charge. My MBP is a mid-2009. I've heard the newer MBPs last even longer.
3) The unibody. I think a few other companies do this now, but the MBP is very low profile, and is built solidly.
4) Backlit keyboard. I remember my old days of groping in the dark for various symbols and things. The backlight makes a difference.
OS aside, if I were looking for a new laptop, these are the things I would look at. CPU speed doesn't effect me nearly as much as Battery life. 4GB RAM is pretty standard these days.
As far as OS X is concerned, I develop "in the cloud". I'm a heavy Vim/gdb user, so if I need a low level environment, I've got plenty of servers I can ssh into. If it's something like Rails or Python, it works perfectly in OS X.
I don't have any experience with other laptops, but both my previous Thinkpad Z61m and my current Lenovo T500 have been great at running Linux and generally running without a problem. The only thing that really sucks are the batteries. On average they last around 18 months, so you have to take 2 * $100 for new batteries into account.
Have a T61. Very solid. Wonderful keyboard. But...horrible LCD. Now most laptop screens aren't very good (MBPs being a notable exception), but this is bad enough that it's almost unbearable if you're used to a desktop LCD or decent laptop screen. And, unfortunately, poor screen quality seems to be a Thinkpad family trait.
I've a T61 and a desktop LCD next to it (Samsung 193p+). The colour profiles are noticeably different (and I grumble about lack of just-working color correction in Linux), but I don't notice any qualitative differences.
Do you prefer glossy or matte laptop screens? Thinkpads are all matte, which makes the screen easier to read in various lighting conditions (no reflections), but makes the colours less vibrant.
They're not the most good looking, but they're rugged and functional as hell. A Thinkpad looks the same after 5 years, most others peel and scratch. When I was backpacking, my road-mate had his macbook come apart .. literally, the case feel out of the bottom and the top came apart. Mine? I threw it into truck beds, buses, ferries, sat on it, slept on it, and it endured everything including the humidity in the Mekong and freezing weather in north-east China, not to mention power surges.