I'll totally give you that, buying thunderbolt stuff was a PITA and expensive xD
Regarding my PC laptop buying, most of my experience has been with HP / Dell (through my day job). The Dells have been better in general... the one they have me with now is pretty solid and nice honestly. My first HP had an issue where the soldering of the power jack broke... so it literally got the point where it had to be plugged in a certain way or it would shut off... eew.
My second HP just eventually went crazy and the HDMI port stopped working, and random bluescreens. It also overheated and throttled all the time... a cooling pad helped but wasn't enough. I eventually found out how to undervolt the CPU and that seemed to help, but I feel I shouldn't have had to go that far to solve it to begin with.
So I tried a MacBook Air after the second HP. It was super tiny and portable and I never had any trouble with it. I pretty much gave it to my girlfriend once I bought the pro. Still works just fine, and she's a lot less careful with hardware than I am heh ><
Regardless of one's hardware I think it's just important to know the limitations on it. If I read a post here with a Air user complaining about not being able to game on their Mac, then it would be "well, you're using Intel 5000 graphics, you're not going to be able to play no matter what you do with that." But most of what I'm reading is Mac users with machines that have a GeForce 650M or higher spec card and they're still having issues. So in that case, it's more like "well, this wrapper is a piece of Opo-Opo poo and yeah, your machine could Boot Camp FFXIV just fine so the actual software offering shouldn't suck this bad."
And the reason I spoke out about the haters is because we actually have machines that CAN play games. No, we're not going to max FPS on high settings but the hardware exceeds the minimum requirements.
( And admittedly, the comment about PC laptops falling apart was off and said because of frustration ^^; )