I think that part of the value proposition of a Mac is OS X itself.

Either OS X is worth the extra hardware spend to you, or it isn't. No point buying it if you're going to go outside the licence; might as well just torrent it and save yourself the money, unless you're in the habit of giving money to large profitable corporations for shits and giggles.

Bottom line, in my opinion, is this: OS X is expensive. It's worth it to me, so much so that I'm prepared to spend the money on a Mac to get it.

Until the licence says you can install it on anything (and the day Apple becomes a software company will be the death of it; I don't believe that OS X can survive as a standalone product in direct competition with Microsoft Windows) then I won't be Hackintoshing.

Apple's business plan and licence might reduce freedom in one dimension - the freedom to install OS X on any computer as you see fit - but it also ensures the survival of the company and the operating system, thus ensuring that I actually have a realistic choice of desktop operating system, assuming for a moment I don't want to run Linux. I think that it's only the tie of OS X to Apple hardware that means that either continues to exist.

I think that in the event of a legal challenge to Apple's licence terms ("...an Apple-labeled computer..."), the victory, which I think would be likely, would be pyhrric. The result would be, a Windows monoculture, with Linux and other free operating systems scavenging the low single-digit percentage that can't or won't run Windows.

And that'd be a bit of a shit sandwich, wouldn't it?