After two decades of Unix use, in 2000 I switched to Apple and OSX - the only reason I considered it was because of the design of the Titanium Powerbook, which I saw in those days as an amazing piece of hardware design, which - amazingly - gave me a Unix workstation in a fantastic portable package. I simply couldn't believe that Apple, of all people, were delivering what I'd wanted for years - a smart, functional, fully working Unix workstation in a portable format.
So I was very happy for a year or two, and am now on my 4th Macbook Pro. The Macbook Pro (17") has come to represent everything that I desired in the 80's and 90's for a Unix workstation.
But: only because I'm running Linux on it. Mac OSX, sure, has its time and place - but when it comes to putting the power of this amazing bit of hardware to good use, nothing beats having a proper Linux distribution onboard. Proper memory management, proper user security model, proper levels of abstraction between a user program and a system service, and so on. Its simply an amazing bit of gear, now that I've set it up right.
Oh, though .. how I wished SGI had gone a different path, and released their Indy laptop to great fanfare. How I wish they hadn't been usurped by Microsoft, it would be so, so nice to have an SGI laptop in the 21st Century ..
This is pretty similar to my story except I was using Macs before OS X came out. I grew up using Macs (my first computer was an SE/30) but I started playing around with Linux around the end of the 90s. When Apple released OS X I was really excited and thought I'd be able to have the best of both systems but I'm really uninterested in OS X at this point. I'm currently using a Santa Rosa MacBook Pro from 2007 and despite having absolutely wretched touchpad support in Linux (the cursor doesn't like to move in diagonals...) I'm much happier running it than I was with Mac OS.
How is the power management? I run a linux (ubuntu) thinkpad for work, and while I find the OS pleasant to use, I have found the battery life dire compared to windows-using colleagues.
I run ubuntu 11.10 on a thinkpad and I find that battery life is on a par with Windows.
You might want to investigate the ASPM power regression issue; pcie_aspm=force might work for you (or wait for ubuntu 12.04 which cw the 3.2 kernel containing the fix)
Ubuntu Studio. Its taken quite a beating, but works absolutely wonderfully with my studio equipment.
The audio experience with this setup is better than that of Mac OSX - but of course I had to choose my hardware well, and administer a good chunk of it myself before it got that way (Presonus Firewire-based audio I/O, complete removal of Pulseaudio, Jack+FFADO configuration) Nothing beats being able to easily install, modify, and compile the sources of every bit of useful software you're using - especially things like audio effects/synthesis plugins, and so on. Need to tweak a filter? Easy: install sources, modify, re-package, install new version. Can't do any of that on Mac OSX nearly as smoothly on Linux.
Did you find a way to get a second mouse button? I saw several howtos that said that a keyboard key could be mapped to it but none worked for me last time I tried (four years ago?)
I used to use Ubuntu on a Macbook, and it was pretty easy to map two-finger-tap to right-click and three-finger-tap to middle-click. I guess if you're the kind of person that hates tap-to-click and prefers hardware buttons, that's not so useful, but I had no problems using it.
So I was very happy for a year or two, and am now on my 4th Macbook Pro. The Macbook Pro (17") has come to represent everything that I desired in the 80's and 90's for a Unix workstation.
But: only because I'm running Linux on it. Mac OSX, sure, has its time and place - but when it comes to putting the power of this amazing bit of hardware to good use, nothing beats having a proper Linux distribution onboard. Proper memory management, proper user security model, proper levels of abstraction between a user program and a system service, and so on. Its simply an amazing bit of gear, now that I've set it up right.
Oh, though .. how I wished SGI had gone a different path, and released their Indy laptop to great fanfare. How I wish they hadn't been usurped by Microsoft, it would be so, so nice to have an SGI laptop in the 21st Century ..