Pixelmator - there are a few other compositing/retouching applications available that also get high marks. Seems like all of the good ones came out in the last 6 months.



With most new Macs you're going to get iDVD, so give that a shot. Up from there you have Apple's DVD Studio Pro as well.



The terminal is great, but not for infrequent batch renaming use. Too cumbersome generally speaking. Try Name Mangler - I just got this one last week and it has promise. There are a few others people swear by though.



In Windows my favs were a combination of Dr.Tag and Tag&Rename. A lot of people swear by Mp3Tag (not Tag Studio) and I found it does quite a bit, but the interface is shite and the program is buggy. On the Mac I use iTunes exclusively, along with some AppleScripts. This can easily handle all the standard tags supported by iTunes. See my other thread and I can post up the names of every script in my collection as well as my workflows for different situations. If I had a choice I'd rather use a really great stand-alone program for most tagging, but iTunes has been getting the job done.



I feel Torrents suck in general. There are a few programs for Mac OS with all that nice Mac OS glitz, but the whole decentralized Torrent concept is the pits as far as I'm concerned and I generally won't touch a torrent for any reason. A number of providers also packet shape the hell out of torrent traffic. Anyway, there are a few programs you can try out as mentioned by others. Bitrocket is another.



Skip iPhoto and test run Aperture and Lightroom. iPhoto is really lackluster in every possible sense and is next to useless for even a moderately sized collection of photos in my opinion (it gets really slow and its management abilities are quite week). Aperture will run fine on the machine you're looking at. My biggest reason for choosing LightRoom was its far simpler, yet far superior DAM (superior to Aperture, not as robust as iMatch for Windows).



I just use the real MS Office. NeoOffice performed terribly the last times I tried it. However, as Tom mentions, you might be able to get by with the Apple products here, depending on your requirements.



You will want to NOT install any Logitech Mouse or Keyboard software for the Mac. Not ever. They have never released anything that is not truly horrible in functionality and performance. Do get SteerMouse instead for all your mouse button mapping and tweaks. Much better in my experience than USB Overdrive and some other alternatives.



I keep all my externals formatted to HFS+, even those I use mostly with Windows. That's because the slowdown I get from using a third-party driver to access them in Windows isn't as significant as the slow access to FAT volumes in Mac OS.



You might have to move to new hardware if this is a function you will eventually really want to use from the Mac side.