It's a nice thought, but the hackintoshes just aren't ready for primetime, and never will be. They typically only work well on specific combinations of PC hardware, and often break when new point releases of Mac OS X come out and fix bugs or change the way the OS works (intentionally or not). They also aren't the equivalent of what I described -- a Mac with a copy of Windows running in a virtual machine (or running natively using BootCamp) is a supported configuration from Microsoft, and from Apple. A homebuilt PC somehow running OS X is not.

In the video you post, for example, they save money on parts by building it themselves, but then fudge the details a bit. It costs $240 ($250 including cheapest shipping) to buy one of those EFi-X units from the lone North American reseller, not the $200 they quote.

That same EFI-X unit also only works with Gigabyte motherboards (and two DFI ones), which are among the least reliable pieces of garbage made, just ahead of Shuttle brand. They use an Intel board in the second build, but it isn't on the list of 'supported' boards.

They also spec their "Mac Pro killer" machine using Intel i7 quad-core chips, rather than Intel Xeon quad-core chips. I suppose they have to, since Gigabyte probably doesn't make any enterprise-grade motherboards capable of using Xeon processors. Both chips use socket LGA1366, but typically the boards have to have firmware capable of recognizing and fully utilizing CPU features, and I doubt the Gigabyte ones do.

Those Gigabyte motherboards are also incapable of acknowledging up to 32GB of RAM like the Mac Pro can.

I guess I also don't need to outline the difference between owning one of Apple's workstations, and ordering disparate parts from multiple mail-order suppliers for the computer upon which your livelihood is based. That's a chunk of what is missing from the price differential here -- support. Here's the process me and everyone else I know goes through when a PC component fails : mail it in somewhere, pay for shipping yourself, and hope a replacement arrives before you're evicted for being unable to work online in the meantime. Actually, i'm lying. We then go buy an entire replacement part, eat the cost ourselves, and then try to pawn off the replacement part which arrives six weeks later on craigslist or on someone just to recoup something for it. That kind of pales in comparison with booking an appointment at the Apple store (or showing up and hoping they take mercy on you between other appointments), or having a Fedex box overnighted to you with a replacement unit in it from Apple.

Are there PC's with similar support offerings? Sure (Dell comes to mind), but they typically don't boot the hackintoshes.

Now, I have seen a tweaked VMWare virtual machine with a copy of Mac OS X inside it that runs perfectly on any PC with a 64-bit CPU and a copy of VMWare installed, but that isn't what we're talking about here

I'm not sure Lian Li or Antec (large, quality PC case and hardware manufacturers) produce equipment that is any less "faggy" than the Apple stuff; maybe some year the industry people who see every product on the market and give out industrial design awards, will give their awards to those companies, like they do to Apple.

I, too, have heard of some threads being locked on Apple's forums; I guess if all the other PC companies had public support forums, we could see how they would lock them, but unfortunately, they don't tend to, so we only get to see what Apple has done.