Win 7 stable?
I've been ruining Win 7 about 6 weeks. It's a clean install on good hardware (I did several hours of burn ins to prove it was fault free). Core duo, 4GB ram, 8800GT, and a couple of drives on an intel RAID controller. It's all relatively generic hardware running 100% Win 7 drivers (no legacy crap running). I have office 2007, and a few common apps (thanks nineite!) installed. It;s running pretty vanilla, with very few tweaks other than interface adjustments. It's pretty much a stock install.
I've had 8-10 BSODs in 6 weeks. 1 while burnign a DVD, several while playing a game, 1 while downloading ISOs from the microsoft Partner site using IE... and 2 while trying to install software. I have rechecked the hardware, re-installed the OS again (from a re-downloaded and reburned image), and performed every kind of scan I can. It's simply not stable... Funny thing is, Vista actually was relatively stable on the same hardware... Only went down when i rebooted for a patch for over a year.
My wife's Macbook Pro... Had it a few weeks now. Running 10.6 on a Core 2 w/ 4GB of RAM and the 9600GT graphics. Have Vista installed in a VM running in coherence mode. It's FAST. It's not crashed a single time. It even plays PC games in the VM with better frame rates than my PC does in some games! Running native from bootcamp Windows is faster at most tasks than my desktop rig. Granted the CPU in the laptop is a bit faster (2.5 vs 2.2), and the 9600GPU is really an 8800 mobile processor, but it;s a laptop, and should have heaty issues holding it back... It doesn't.
The other day she was playing DnD Online from the VM instance of Vista and I was streaming music off her notebook through an Airport Express at the same time, using my iPhone as the remote to controll it. She had left iChat logged in any my parents logged in and requested a video chat. A notification poped up while she was playing and she clicked on it, launging iChat over the game still running full screen behind it. She chatted with my mom in video chat for 3 or 4 minutes, then switched back to the game. She never noticed an issue in video performance of either the game while I was streaming music, or in iChat while it was trying to also render the game in the background (the game graphics did stutter while she was in iChat, but the music I was pumping into the other room never stuttered). Granted, load times in the game are somewhat impacted by all the activity, and no, she can't run the game with quite so many "high" settings runnign in a VM as she can running direct, but it's so much better than her previous PC she doesn't even care... The fact that the Mac OS can handle multipple apps while streaming, and balance a VM running a 3D game at the same time, i've never seen a PC able to handle that...