The Mac vs PC debate is age old and pretty fruitless. It's like arguing between getting a pet dog or a pet cat.
It is age old, but since Apple moved to x86 architecture, it's more relevant now than ever.
the extra expense goes on hardware that very rarely faults,
Mac / PC now use common architecture, so you can get just as good hardware in a PC.
an operating system that is so much more simple and intuitive,
Again, I personally disagree, I never found one more simple or intuitive than the other, but I guess it's up to the individual
and is about 99% less prone to viruses.
You're certainly less likely to get a virus on an Mac without firewall and virus protection compared to a PC without firewall and virus protection, but to use any computer on any shared network without this kind of protection is just daft.
Despite what some would have you think, MacOS is not less prone by design, just not as attractive to the virus writers. Most viruses these days are written for the purpose of gaining access to machines to use their processing power for spamming etc.
If 90% of people in the world used MacOS, then virus writers would focus their efforts looking for security flaws in MacOS and then writing viruses to exploit said flaws.
Sorry for the Fisking and possible thread hijack, I can totally understand why people want to buy a Mac, Apple's design nous is second to none (I have an iPhone and love it to bits, despite the technical shortcomings), but when it comes to a tool like a computer, for me Mac has never managed to put forward a convincing argument.
Good luck with it though Ahjno, I'm sure you will love your Mac! (And you can always get Boot Camp and run Windows on it!)