Not quiet true, if you live in the UK.
My powerbook has died on me twice in the past year (motherboard once and hard-drive once).
When I phoned Apple for support, the first thing the Indian call centre worker does is try to get me to buy AppleCare (never miss a sales opportunity).
This in heavily accented and broken english.
Of course it took them around 15 minutes to actually answer the phone.
Then he asks me to run hardware tests from the apple DVD.
Then he asks me to reformat and re-install before finally accepting it's a hardware problem.
The only benefit I found compared with Dell was, in both cases it took less than a week for them to fix it and get it back to me.
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), Is Not Just A Buzzword Anymore