MBP's are the best portable computers you can get for your money. Personally I find them better than any Dell, HP, Lenovo or Acer and I have recommended them a lot. In fact, MBP's are the only Apple product in last 15 years that I think deserves to be called great and the only thing worth buying from Apple. That said, all Mac OS versions starting with Tiger are pretty lousy to do anything really serious. I find MBP's run Windows XP or Windows 7 a lot better than Mac OS. Windows 7 on a fully spec'ed out MBP is the perfect portable workstation.
As far as after sales service is concerned, they are just as lousy as the competition. My previous company was a corporate customer of Apple considering the sheer volume of Apple MBP's, iMac's, Mac Pros and other products that were procured and used, but the service was never good enough to be called anything but average. We had a bunch of MBP's that were used as portable workstation's. They were stressed a lot with > 80% CPU load for 10~12 hours a day with our work which is what/how they are meant to used and how they differ from the regular MB's. But when they started failing one after another, instead of fixing or replacing them, they started blaming us saying that we are stressing them a lot. Heck, my company did not purchase them at such a premium (1.6Lac each) for them to be used 4 hours a day at less than 50% load. There were many other instances where they grudgingly provided support and probably only because they would have been sued otherwise.
For retail customers, I guess its all a matter of luck as far as after sales service is concerned regardless of whether you buy from Apple or any of the competition. There are a tonne of customers who have just as bad experiences with Apple, Dell, HP or Lenovo. All of them are equally lousy with support.
