Ye Old Mac vs. PC Debate

After trying to encode some HD wedding footage to H.264 the need for a desktop computer is once again rearing its ugly head.  I've been mostly desktop-free for the past several years, but there just isn't enough juice in a laptop for such heavy duty tasks.  50 hours to encode a 1 hour video is a little long and I can't leave my only computer tied up that long.

I'm a hardcore Mac OS X fan, but since the introduction of the Mac Pro back in 2006 the prices have been ridiculous for what you get.  When I bought my G5 in 2004 I got at dual core 2.5 GHz system for under $3000 when there still weren't any realistic dual core PC options.  It was a great system for the price.  The Mac Pro, however, is under-powered and over-priced.  Let's look at a good ol' side-by-side comparison:

PC	Mac Pro
Intel i7-950 3.06 GHz Quad-Core	Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz Quad-Core
6GB DDR3 RAM	3GB DDR3 RAM
Two 1TB 7200RPM HDD (RAID0)	1 TB 7200RPM HDD
Blu-Ray Burner	DVD Burner
ATI Radeon HD 6850 w/ 1GB GDDR5	ATI Radeon HD 5770 w/ 1GB GDDR5
$1300	$2500

For half the price you get quite a bit more.  The Intel i7-9xx series CPUs are overclocking beasts, surpassing 4 GHz on air and even higher speeds with water cooling.  A huge bump in CPU performance, twice the RAM, twice the hard drive space with a speed boost from a RAID configuration, nearly twice the graphics performance, and built-in Blu-Ray makes the Mac Pro look foolish.  Apple should be embarrassed by this system.  Adding $1000 to the Mac doubles the RAM and gets you eight cores (at only 2.4 GHz). Still not a great system, especially for the money, in my opinion.  I would say the i7 at over 4 GHz would give the octo-core Mac Pro a run for its money in most normal and moderately heavy real-world tasks.  

Is OS X worth $1200 and a big performance hit?  OS X is a wonderful OS, but for a heavy-hitter system for video editing and encoding, you'd be using just about the same programs for each platform.  OS X just isn't worth that much of a sacrifice.  Plus you'd have to add on a Blu-Ray burner if you actually want to store your HD footage.  Sorry Apple, but this is one battle that you've clearly lost.