what you want to do is determine everything you want the computer to do.
Macs are sweet and expensive, OS X and office will be great for college papers and the like. My gripe with them is that most of the stuff is over simplified and not as easy to get into the advanced settings if you don't know what you are doing. As for Windows based notebooks, my friend has the HP dv6000 and it works really well, no problems and he's had it about year and also isn't the most technical person in the world.
If i had money to blow, Mac Book Pro, with VMware to run vista/xp, i'd go for it.
What the MBP has that the regular macbook doesn't:
A real graphics card
15 inch screen
But then you are looking at damn good Windows based laptops as well.