Welcome to the mac! I switched almost a year ago, and get irritated whenever I have to sit behind a windows box. I used to love linux, but it is so unpolished. There are a few things that I wish would be ported over to mac- kdevelop being one, but for the most part, I am very glad I finally took the plunge.

I am very happy with Poser 7 and Vue on the mac.  Daz Studio works really well too. I am starting to find that it is actually a much better program than poser, but there are some important features that need to be added before it can really replace it.

Check out Xee for image viewing. It's a nice light weight browser. Perfect when you have lots of subtle variations on the same render that you want to look over. (it's free)

BetterZip is a winzip like program. Much better for extracting stuff than any other I've found (shareware)

I have iWork, which I think is a great deal, if you do any sort of document creation. Much better than anything else I've used.

I am using fireworks for my postwork. It's not quite as complete as photoshop, but I don't need anything it's missing. And it does all the nice little vector stuff I need for prgramming stuff.

I use parallels at work, but the program I use it for is visual Studio (the newest resource hog version). I hate having to load  it, because it's so slow. I'm not sure about vmware's stuff. I've heard they are about the same. If you use windows inside your OS-X, be sure you have lots of RAM- since windows will need 1 or 2 to run reasonably smoothly. Not the VM software, just the nature of computing.

I paid for another license for poser. It was on sale, so I didn't mind. My version of vue was really old, so it gave me an excuse to upgrade. I've heard that some companies will let you use your serial number, though. So you might go ahead and send a inquiry so you will know what to do when the machine is in.