A B&W can be a very usable Mac if you use a PCI card for hard disk controller, and don't use FireWire for large file transfers. The built-in IDE interface is useless on a rev.A and can be problematic on rev.B (some work fine, some don't). FireWire on all 3 B&Ws I've worked with start corrupting with transfers over 100 MB or so. They are OK with smaller file transfers, but are no good for backing up disks to external drives, for example.

My suggestion is get a B&W if you like the style and take the plastic shell off and put it on a Sawtooth G4, which does have a working disk controller and FireWire. G4s are getting very cheap these days - cheaper than PCI disk controller cards for G3s.