Those guys at ATP (I'm a listener, too) piss all over Android on a regular basis, as do most all Mac / iOS developers! I know where they're coming from, and I think they're right, but objectivity isn't their strong point with so much invested in Apple's ecosystem.
Of course, by that argument: objectivity isn't my strong suit either!
I do have an unusual amount of experience using old Apple gear, though. I'm typing this on an
iMac G4 that's going on half the age of
this keyboard! Even with hardware that's likely an order of magnitude slower than any Intel Mac, I get instantaneous typing (allowing for how little we humans can see) so long as I use the right software. Safari on this old guy can be a bit laggy, depending on what else its got going on. Xcode was never great. And Microsoft Word was always a nightmare on PowerPC as soon as you were a few pages deep in a document. But
BBEdit and TextWrangler are superb on any age of Mac.
I'm well out of date re: Windows. I switched away when I was still running Windows 2000! But I expect the same rules apply there, too. Older versions of Windows (XP etc.) were better matched to the hardware of the time than early OS X (10.0 through 10.5). For what it's worth though, I've only ever seen snappiness on any modern hardware the last 5 years or so, either side of the divide. All that Intel hardware seems to do a damn good job at handling random load.
