Here is my advice. Go Apple.
This is coming from a professional video game developer who spent much of his youth playing PC games and hating Apple. I spend every day on a PC working and come home to my Mac.
When the latest generation of MacBooks came out with Intel processors, my last reason for hating them went away. Now you can use a program called Bootcamp to install Windows on a separate hard drive partition if you want. I thought I would do it, but I never found a reason to install Windows on my Mac. I just didn't miss the programs I thought I would miss.
I bought a 17" MacBook Pro from the Apple site a couple years ago. It was refurbished and I used the money I saved buying refurb to get the model that had the solid state hard drive with no moving parts.
I use mine for some gaming (admittedly I use my XBox a lot more), audio recording with Garage Band/Logic, Netflix and just general use stuff.
For the hardware, you pay a bit more, but the software is generally really well integrated and damn fast. Searching for files is faster than any PC I've ever used... including the beastly $4,000-$5,000 PCs we use for development at work.
The only things that drive me nuts about Apple are iTunes and their non-support of Flash on mobile devices. I had a crazy scare the other week updating my phone. iTunes hid my backup files in some weird place where iTunes couldn't find it. I had to track them down and copy/paste 3,000+ files to get my contacts and all of that back.
Generally, my experience has been great though.