Hi MIna,
1st of all welcome back!!!!! As for MAC use..
My house is home to a mix of systems, as I'm in the industry. I have 2 PC's running XP and Vista, a X86 w Linux and 3 macs. The macs get the most use lately, in that they run Apples OSX as well as dual boot to the Windows environments when needed. That gives me the ability on my MacPro laptop to use whatever SW I want, without the need to be too concerned about the technical OS. I guess that qualifies me as a TRANS-COMPUTER user.
Depending upon your needs , the base macbook is good for most things, but it has a slower graphics processor. That graphics chip is ok for everything except 3D games.
The MACBOOK PRO however, has very fast graphics chips, main processors, in addition to options for faster disk drives. This makes high bandwidth requirements such as recording music direct to disk , 3d graphics for games and running multiple operating systems when needed. In fact it runs much of my Windows sw faster than my native PC's.
As far as basic stuff such as word processing, excel, etc... the files created go back and forth between both environments w/o any problems.
Good luck on your purchase.
Hugz from a sister,
MichelleLynn