Well, since my earlier comment was 'off topic' I'll share some of the info given to me by a good friend and co-worker, who also happens to be the creative director for Smoke & Mirrors. Mac's operating system is the issue. It's written in a language that has to do something like three times as many translations as Windows, which is closer to machine language relatively speaking. This is the issue first and foremost.

That's just ignorance. The ignorance may not be deliberately malicious, but that's still what it is. Both systems are written principally in C and C++, with some assembly language in the bottom machine-dependent layers. As are all modern operating systems. Your creative director may be trying to contrast C/C++ against Cocoa (Objective C), but without any real understanding of what they are. Objective C is really just C with some object-oriented extensions... the same as C++. Obj-C is more like Smalltalk than C++, with better support for runtime polymorphism; but the runtime costs are small even where the features are used, and nil otherwise.

And even so, this isn't the kernel, or even the low-level runtime libraries, (which are Open Source Darwin/BSD and GNU) but the complex of object frameworks that comprise the Mac's Cocoa GUI environment. Don't imagine for an instant that the Windows GUI class libraries are any simpler or "closer to the machine"; it ain't so. And while the Mac GUI is accelerated by 3D rendering hardware, that's an innovation that Microsoft hasn't yet copied. (Though they've already announced that they will for Longhorn, when and if it ever actually ships.)

In any case, though, Poser, Photoshop, very likely Maya and LightWave, are not Cocoa (Objective C) applications; they're "Carbon" applications. Carbon is a traditional C/C++ environment that's directly comparable to the GUI environment on Windows.

By the way, Mac OS X also supports "Cocoa" programming in Java; this is directly analogous to the use of C# in .Net, and C# after all is just Microsoft's clone of Java since they weren't allowed to corrupt Java to make it nonportable. [Note that this is not to say they don't have some smart people at Microsoft. C# does have some serious technical advantages over Java; but not enough to outweigh the risks of Microsoft's anti-standards philosophy.]

Hey, if you want to use Windows, go for it. Have a great time. The fact is that very few Windows people know much about the Mac (as your friend's comments attest); while most Mac people (and all of them in any professional environment) are extremely familiar with Windows and choose the Mac. We know there are more of you, and while that can be frustrating, in the end we really don't care because the advantages are overwhelming.

And if Microsoft's monopoly marketing machine manages in the end to get you all to kill off the Mac, you aren't likely to find most of us switching to Windows. That would be just silly.