I personally would not own an Apple product of any kind, due to their "need" to keep everything closed/proprietary and tightly controlled by the company, locking you into THEIR solutions. This is for every product they own.
Apple is a "design" company, not an innovative company. OSX is based *directly* on BSD, which is Unix, and very close cousin to Linux. Mac took the entire BSD code, added their "pretties" to the interface, and locked it down. (BSD is open-source, so it was perfectly legal for them to do this.) Apple chose BSD over Linux as the base, because of a significant difference in the licensing of BSD vs. Linux. If they had chosen Linux as their base, they would have had to "contribute back" to the LInux community any changes they made to the OS. With BSD, they could take all they wanted, and did not have to "return" anything to the community. Again, this is perfectly legal, so they did nothing "technically wrong" in doing so.
Linux is a sharing community. When you make a change to a program on a GPL program (GNU Public LIcense) you have to share the code with anyone you distribute your program that was changed, so everyone benefits from your work, just as you benefited from the hard work of the thousands and thousands of developers who wrote the programs you are using. (You can make all the changes you want for personal/company use without having to release your code and changes, as long as the program is not sold or distributed to others.)
As to which distro...
If you want headaches and PITA updates, go for a slackware distro. Mandriva has had lots of problems with updates and version updates in the past. Fedora is so-so, not a favorite of mine - way too tightly tied to what redhat wants in their commercial version - it's just a testing ground for the RHL releases.
Ubuntu is decent. It's a joke that the word Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning "I could not get Debian to install on my hardware." There is a lot of truth to this, especially in the past.
Ubuntu tries to keep their distro "pure" in the "Open Source Spirit" by not including apps (and more importantly drivers.) that are not fully open source. This can lead to some difficulties installing certain wireless network cards, video cards and such. There is no reason you, as the end user, can not get the proprietary drivers and firmwares for these devices, they just are not included by default in the distro. Also things like multimedia codecs are not in the main distro, and the easiest way to add them is to add debian-multimedia.org into your repositories. Debian doesn't care that you add them, and even have FAQs to help you, they just refuse to include them in their own sources.
Debian (the main distro) tends to be *very* stable, but that also means slow to get the newest versions of programs. You have the option of using Debian "testing" or Debian SID (also called unstable") where all the newest cutting-edge versions of programs are first released. (SID is the character in Toy Story who like to break things. All Debian releases are named after Toy Story characters.)
If you want the cutting edge, but a little more stability, I would suggest checking out the Sidux distro.
It has several advantages over other distros in that it is a "rolling release". (Gentoo and a few other lesser-known distros are also "rolling releases")
In a Rolling Release distro there are no "version numbers" per-say. Yes, they release a few new versions every year to keep up with new hardware so that installations go smooth, but when you do an "update" on the system, you are always at the most current level. It doesn't matter if you downloaded a version from 2 years ago, or downloaded it today, once you do an "apt-get update", "apt-get dist-upgrade", both systems will be at exactly the same version. You might call it "version TODAY".
You never have to wait for the next release of the distro like 10.04, 10.10, 11.04 like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva etc.
Sidux is based on Debian SID (very cutting edge) but each package added to SID is evaluated for stability first, and either modified by the Sidux team, or "held back" for a week or two to make sure your system will be stable before it is released. Once a package becomes stable in SID, then the official Debian release replaces the Sidux package, so it is always fully "binary compatible" with Debian.
The easiest way to update, install tweaks, etc. for Sidux is go to smxi.org and follow the directions to download and install the smxi script. Just run smxi as root (or sudo smxi) from a command prompt in Sidux and it will manage your updates for you.
Sidux is also *extremely* fast to install, making it very good for things like virtualization. A complete Sidux install, once you have your hard drive partitioned and formatted (which depending on your experience level can take 2 to 10 minutes), takes anywhere from 4 1/2 minutes to 6 minutes, depending on y