Say what you will about Dell's tech support, but in the end of the day, they've served me way better than Apple has. Sure, you get routed 3 times and spend half an hour in the phone, but your warranty claims get fulfilled with reasonable terms. As a computer enthusiast that prefers to work on his own machine rather than sending it off and having downtime, this is very valuable. In the past, Dell has offered to send a prepaid box to ship the machine to them. I explained that I can't afford any down time and prefer to just swap parts out myself. They complied - they've sent me boxes of parts that are prepaid to send the defected parts back. I've done it with memory, batteries, optical drives, and even main boards!
This has a lot of value, in my opinion. Sure, their tech support sucks if you're the average consumer, but if you know what you're doing, it's stellar. Diagnose the problem, get a replacement part, and pleasure doing business. No bullshitting around with setting a stupid appointment at a "genius" bar so that they can take your laptop for 5 days to do what would take you 20 minutes. Dell's warranty terms are also very liberal - everything is covered, including changing out your own parts, as long as there isn't any abuse or installation error. Awesome.
So think about that when you decide what to buy.