Office 2004 takes forever to load on an Intel-based Mac because it's a rosetta app. in one photoshop test I ran, my G3/500 PowerBook "demolished" a 1.83GHz MBP, both systems had 512mb of ram. (The G3 got like 27 mins 30 seconds, the MBP got 29 minutes 30 seconds. Not the biggest difference ever, but the MBP was one year old, the G3 was six or seven.)

I use Bean on my iMac for text processing, and for anything really heavy, Office 2007 on my ThinkPad, it runs really fast.

[An actual post about software developers will come later tonight.]