Make good products and you won’t have to worry about Apple.
While some have Vista working fine, many more don’t.
Explorer 7.0 is unusable due to the layout. Why would the refresh button be located across the screen from the other stuff without the ability to customize?
Office 2007 has no ability to switch to a classic view. Simple thing yet left out.
Somebody is asleep at the wheel.
I just bought a little netbook (Acer Aspire One, and I love it) and it came with a trial of Office 2007 so I tried it. Didn't even bother to check on the purchase price, it is crap. Like you said, nothing is in the right place, and some things I couldn't find at all.
I have been using Office 2000 Professional for a long time but it is getting a bit long in the tooth. Lately I have been using more open source stuff and OpenOffice is getting better with each release - it is at the point where it's better than Office 2000 and as good as Office 2003 which I have at the office.
As for Apple "tax" I dunno. OS-X Leopard is the same price as an upgrade version of Windoze Vista, and though Apple would prefer you use it on an Apple PC, it will run on a lot of non-Apple computers. If there was something I really wanted to do that only worked on OS-X I would have no trouble installing it.