After drooling over MacBooks for weeks, I finally went out and bought one last weekend.  I've had Apples around me since I was little when my dad brought home a Lisa for testing.  I'm by no means an expert, but there are applications for music and video creation that I wanted to use more often and my G5 isn't exactly portable.

I'd prefer to lug only one laptop around and I'll need to be able to do all of the things I do with my Windows XP laptop before I can risk leaving it at home.  So, over the weekend, I began my quest to find the software that would complete my experience.  Thanks to Google and Lifehacker, I think this list is pretty close to complete.  If you have other suggestions, let me know!

Entourage:  I must have my Email!  Not only that but my shared calendars, and mailboxes, as well.  It's different from Outlook 2003 (and 2007) but not in a bad way, just more Mac-like.

QuickSilver:  helps me find and start any application, folder, or document in a snap.  It does lots more and I've just scratched the surface

iTerm: a nice terminal app for SSH and other fun terminal stuff

Remote Desktop Connection for Mac: the gateway to all of my windows servers and my XP desktop that runs all of the apps that I can't run on my Mac (VS 2005 or Office 2007 anyone?).

The UnArchiver: for those archive formats the built-in archiver for Mac doesn't handle

MenuMeters:  awesome set of tools for monitoring CPU, disk, memory and network activity at a glance from the menu bar

SlimBatteryMonitor:  a smaller and therefore better menu bar battery indicator

Flip4Mac: plays windows media files within quicktime player, iMovie, and Final Cut.

Google Video Player:  download (and resume download) of Google Video downloads

Democracy Player:  the future of video and RSS in one app

Gawker: a cool app for creating time lapse video

Transmit:  good lookin' GUI for a FTP client

That's about it.  If you have suggestions, leave me a comment!