This morning my Mac decided to act like a Windows box - a bunch of applications froze up (Mail, iPhoto, iTunes) - and the only way to unzombie them was a reboot. And that required a hard power off, because shutdown wasn't able to kill them, either.

Strange. I like the Mac a lot, and it's a huge, huge improvement over Windows - but it's not a perfect platform, regardless of what the fanboys would have you believe :)