"Equally effective strategies could be built around Classmate PCs, Android smartphones, WebOS tablets (sure, we?ll see those soon), standard netbooks, thin clients, or non-Mac laptops. Any of these situations might be cheaper, more flexible, or fit better with existing infrastructures and applications."
To be fair, it is needed to say that if one would include costs of additional software (instead of iLife, which is not offered for PCs) of comparable quality, and, mainly, huge hidden administrative costs (there were researches about -- quantity of work-hours that are hidden in managing PCs alone is striking, let alone managing another couple of platforms like WebOS and Android), then you should have included the option where those PC-Android-WebOS "effective strategies" could cost more.
Let alone the fact that managing those various platforms itself is headache independently on cost , and user experience would not be even close to level of consistency and coherency with MacOS/iPhoneOS solution . So, eventually, quality and smoothness of education would differ.
Also, it should be noted that Apple offers significant discounts for its equipment for education purposes , so even bare cost will be not that high or pricier than that of HP and Dell in comparable configurations (though they do not offer comparable configuration: there is no yet real competitor to iLife in terms of quality and consistency; lets see if this situation would improve in the future). It might be even cheaper, considering applications loaded, let alone the quality of those applications and of user experience those provide.
A couple months ago, Apple sent me a MacBook Pro and an iPod Touch to evaluate as an instructional platform. The Apple salesperson essentially dared me not to fall in love with Snow Leopard, the 15″ MBP, and the Touch for creating, managing, and pushing educational content to students. I challenged myself to explore the platform more thoroughly than I ever had with my MacBook which I essentially used just like any other computer. Maybe I’d been missing something, since, until that point, the value proposition of Apple hardware had been pretty much lost on me. 
Although I’d hoped to chronicle my use of the MBP more regularly, life got in the way, so I set my other computers aside and just used the heck out of the loaner Mac, doing both my daily work and producing as much multimedia content as possible. I managed the content on both the loaner iPod Apple sent me and my son’s Touch to get a feel for working with the iPods as 1:1 devices or in classroom sets. Podcasts, music, books, PDFs, you name it - if it was educationally relevant, I pushed it out there. I tested Adobe CS5 (and fell in love with the latest iteration of Photoshop) and had my oldest son (who is headed to film school in the fall) create all of his movies in the latest version of iMovie.
So what happened? Have I been wrong as I fell further out of love with my aging MacBook? Have I been unimpressed with Macs simply because we haven’t been pushing them to their full potential?
