I have had significant problems with jEmplode of late, but that's under Linux. Maybe it'll work better under MacOS. And I'm pretty sure that emplode will run fine under VirtualPC, but I'm not sure on the USB front. I'll check all of those in the next few for you (I need to know myself anyway, and this is jus tthe impetus I need.)

There's no EAC-quality ripper with MacOS, but, unless you've got badly scratched CDs, it probably doesn't make a lot of difference. You can use LAME with iTunes, supposedly, but folks have claimed that iTunes built-in encoder is just as good. LAME is much slower, too. Probably due to the lack of assembler-optimized code.

I currently have Windows 2000, MacOS X, Linux, OpenBSD, and Solaris machines. The MacOS X install is slightly more usable than Windows, and that takes into account it's running slowly on a machine that it isn't supposed to be running on and that my max resolution is 800x600 (I desperately want a TiBook, but I need food more ). So, if you've got a good machine, I'd say definitely go for a Mac. They're wonderful. Anyone who tells you differently is afraid of change.