I'm not an Apple fan, but there's one thing that consistently makes me really jealous about their hardware.
Despite generally scary-buggy EFI firmwares in their Intel CPU based machines, Apple's firmwares support what they call Target Disk Mode. This is a tech support and service dream, and has been supported since Apple moved over to "New World" PowerPC machines with their Forth based OpenFirmware, ie for a very long time.
Target disk mode is great for data recovery, OS repairs, OS reinstalls, disk imaging, backups, accessing data on laptops with broken displays without having to rip the HDD out of them, and lots else. It's just great. Unless you have an Apple you don't get it, and there's no longer any good reason for that.
UPDATE July 2012: Kernel Newbies reports that support for exporting SCSI over USB and FireWire has been merged into the Linux kernel. This will make it much easier to produce bootable USB keys that export the host system's hard drives. Unfortunately it's useless with most machines as it appears to require a USB gadget or OTG port, or a FireWire port.
