I love my MAC for all the reasons that Rachel listed... tech support is awesome and as she said, it just works! I went through so many hassles with our old PCs and the technician never really seemed to listen or fix the problem. So frustrating!
I'm really not sure how much additional software costs because mine came with everything I really needed. You don't need to buy Word anymore because they're Pages program will open any Word document and even allow you save it as Word document so PC users can open it. It's definitely a great investment!