no, i think the right decision was made. i don't think you really want to be administering windows machines; quite a pita (especially if it means eventually running xp64, which is still quite beta). i think overall tco will be lower and productivity higher, w/ the macs (at least in my experience).

one weakness w/ those machines though are the lack of built in rs232 serial ports... makes creating hw/sw interfaces harder...

the numbers are mostly a wash except for premier (which no one uses on the mac anyway; would be interesting to see combustion 3 speed comparisons; or maya, renderman, brazil or other render times) quake doesn't really count either since it was optimized for x86 and was only ported later by the OMNI group. i'd like to see some real benchmark comparisons (and i wouldn't be surprised if the athlon64 kicked butt) but i'm pretty skeptical about the one cited. seems like a hack job.

that being said, we definitely need some athlon64's so we can play hl2 in all its glory.