Well, considering that whenever someone posts on a technical forum (such as HN) asking what laptop to get to run Linux, they receive a lot of recommendations that they get Macs, I don't think "best personal computers in the world" is too far out of line for Apple to claim.
iPods completely dominate portable music playback, and the iTunes store is one of the biggest sellers of music in the world (didn't they take #1 a while back?). That would justify "leads the digital music revolution".
Take a look at Android's UI design before the iPhone came out, and compare to after iPhone. Look familiar? Take a similar look at mobile app sales before and after iPhone. "Revolutionary" is an acceptable claim, considering how much the mobile phone industry changed in direct response to the iPhone.
That leaves the iPad, the only one on the list they may have overhyped in the press release. Sure, it blows away every other attempt at a tablet so far, but most of the other table makers trying to capitalize on the iPad's success seem to be aiming for smaller tablets, so we can't yet say the iPad is "defining the future".
apple laptops ≠ linux machines. in fact, most of the new macbooks are quite hard to get running on something modern like ubuntu 10.4 LTS, and just because OSX is a derivative of BSD doesn't make it friendly with current linux versions. especially those macbooks with "automatic graphics switching" and the like. sure you can boot, but all the [proprietary] advanced [closed] features that apple adds don't really function at all.
I think the reason that people suggest Mac over Linux for laptops is that 1. Apple makes really good laptops. They're solid, they're lightweight, they're not creaky and they don't feel cheap; 2. You can do anything on OS X that you can on Linux (e.g. running bash, RoR, Python scripting, most open-source software).
This is a big part of the reason geeks are moving in large volumes to the Mac: you can have your laptop, you can compile and run Apache or PHP, install gems, test Rails, and it's all just as effortless as in Linux (or, depending on the Linux distro, even more so).
What you don't have to do is re-configure X or your nvidia drivers when a 'yum update' does a kernel upgrade, and you suddenly find yourself without X for ten minutes while you find and run the nvidia kernel module builder/installer (a problem everyone in my office had every few weeks at one company).
A lot of stuff just works effortlessly, and while this is getting better in Linux, there's still a lot of 'gotchas' that crop up out of nowhere because some company or some developer just doesn't care.
It's not a question of 'You want Linux, buy a Mac and run Linux on it', it's a question of asking why the user wants Linux. If it's so that all your software, top-to-bottom (excluding the BIOS) is open-source, then get a Lenovo, but if what you want is a better Rails dev environment than Windows, a Mac will do that for you and be less effort in the long run.
This is the reason I'm on a Mac, and it's the reason a lot of other open-source or web app developers run Macs as well, and I think it's the secret sauce that's made a big difference in Apple's sales numbers - geeks buy, then geeks recommend.
iPods completely dominate portable music playback, and the iTunes store is one of the biggest sellers of music in the world (didn't they take #1 a while back?). That would justify "leads the digital music revolution".
Take a look at Android's UI design before the iPhone came out, and compare to after iPhone. Look familiar? Take a similar look at mobile app sales before and after iPhone. "Revolutionary" is an acceptable claim, considering how much the mobile phone industry changed in direct response to the iPhone.
That leaves the iPad, the only one on the list they may have overhyped in the press release. Sure, it blows away every other attempt at a tablet so far, but most of the other table makers trying to capitalize on the iPad's success seem to be aiming for smaller tablets, so we can't yet say the iPad is "defining the future".