I really don't understand the hate. As far as design goes, I don't see many competitors to apple's computers, and mostly crappy alternatives to music players. I also haven't experienced that good of customer support from any other company, ever.
Design: Even though I'm an ubuntu guy now, I don't think I can switch to another laptop maker. The touch pad is huge, the click and 2nd click are ambidextrous and represented by a single button. The disk drive is slot loading. The power cord is magnetic (with less wear, more reliable connection, and less danger to the computer). The screen and sleep light change brightness by the ambient light. The keys are backlit on demand. The case in aluminum instead of cheap and thin plastic. The screen joint is recessed, and it doubles as the wireless antennae. If I found a cheaper, more reliable laptop with most of these features, I'd switch instantly. However, I haven't found any with half of these features, and most of them I feel are essential.
portable music players suffer a similar fate. Without going into great detail (there are a lot of options and a huge lack of standardization), I haven't found a portable music player that is as intuitive to use and manage as the iPod/iTunes combo.
Support story:
My wife's macbook pro (used to be mine) has had several problems in its life. The graphic card melted off, the corner got chipped, a key broke off, and the disk drive made some really funny noises. The key and the funny noises I can blame on my own mistreatment of the thing, and the graphics card issue was a known issue with that particular card among all manufacturers. When we took the computer in each time, they repaired it with no questions asked, and more that we didn't complain about. The battery was dying, they replaced it. They key broke, they replaced the entire top (including the chipped piece). half the parts of the laptop are basically new, including parts that they weren't liable for.
with an old iPod nano (won't buy another one, the new ones are ugly and the iPod touch's are expensive), the screen had a black bar across the middle. Looking at the back, the culprit was apparently a dent from one of the many times I dropped it, and those things are pretty thin. I took it in, the guy noticed the dent and said "we'll pretend we didn't see that", and gave me a new iPod.
I don't like all their software, and I hate how quickly software becomes obsolete with new OS versions, but I can barely say enough good things about their design decisions.