Vizio is making some Aluminum unibody all-in-one PCs, laptops and ultrabooks. The industrial design is very very good and certainly on par with Apple stuff. They are also trying to do this at a much more affordable price than Apple.
I'll admit that Apple makes very well designed products. It's part of why they are successful. They make products people want and will pay a premium for over the standard stuff we see in the market. However, if Vizio provides an equally good product, then really the only difference is the OS, and there's nothing stopping you from putting OSX on a PC.
However, the newest macbook pro can't be upgraded at all, which totally sucks. You can't even change the battery yourself. Apple designs obsolescence into their products from the start, which makes them less desirable in many ways.
In a response to TGS's original post, you really should just tell the person, "Oh. It seems you purchased an Apple product. To upgrade, you should go buy the next one." It's not that upgrading ram or anything on a Mac is that difficult (until the macbook pro), it's just that Apple is more about the "experience" instead of specs, so they don't make it easy to know what your specs are.
But really, there are other products with equally good industrial design. People just judge these with their Apple-centric bias. They think the design is crap because there isn't an apple logo on the back of the device.
I had a 20Gb ipod in 2005, and I loved it. I didn't need to carry my CDs with me anymore. Two years later I got a Zune80 on release date and fell in love. The Zune software was so much better than iTunes and handled files better. About a year and a half ago the Zune80 finally died and I reluctantly sold it on eBay, but only after getting a ZuneHD64.
I also have an iPhone 4S. It's the first smartphone I've ever had and it's very nice for the things it allows me to do that I wasn't able to do with my other smartphones. However, I don't think it's the best phone out there or the best phone OS. Sure, in 2007 iPhone was the only smartphone worth having, but I think Apple has really fallen behind. I think that sales are going to drop in the next few years. People will say it's because Steve Jobs died, but really it will be because the rest of the market caught up and passed Apple in terms of design and performance.
Right now I wish I had a Lumia 920. The iPhone wasn't enough to win me over long term. Still, if I were buying a tablet today, I would probably go with the iPad. I like to think that I'm not a fanboy of any of these products, companies, ecosystems, or operating systems.