Ok, apple are harder to yews, but are virus-free and generally better performance-wise.
Windows is simple, and allows everything, is easy to hack, and is crawling with viruses.
Apple has always prided themselves on being easier to yews for most consumer tasks.
Your statement on viruses requires only one counterexample, which is trivial to provide.
Performance-wise I have yet to see any consistent benchmarks where the same hardware performs better running Mac OS than Windows. It's funny to read reviews of MacBook Pros and see higher benchmarks under Windows 7 than Mac OS.
Windows is simpler than it used to be.
Starting with Vista, it no longer "allows everything", at least to the extent that it used to.
In some sense it may be "easier to hack" than some other platforms, but hacks are reliant on so many different methods and frequently third party software that "hackability" is hard to quantify.
Historically there have been more viruses for Windows, but one can attribute that to simple economics - most bang for the buck to develop viruses on the most common platform.
Due to the success of Mac, security through obscurity is no longer a viable model. They're being fairly proactive with the iOS security by only allowing signed code to run. There have been jailbreaks but those are the inevitable bugs that get patched fairly quickly. Overall there's far lower risk running on iOS than on Android. Of course you pay for the walled garden both in dollars and in reduced customizability.
Going forward the focus of consumers, businesses, and therefore hackers is going to be mobile moreso than desktop. Mac (OSX) and Linux have had a superior security model to Windows for a long time, with which Windows 7 is just now beginning to reach parity. You can and perhaps should get antivirus on Mac and Linux, in addition to Windows.
At the end of the day the weakest link in security is the user. I went to my uncle's for Christmas, and he uses Internet Explorer (9) for everything; it had 5 toolbars installed and all these plugins for flash games. I uninstalled all of that, ran several anti spyware programs, defragmented etc. Now that most OSes come with reasonable security defaults, the main vector for infecting large numbers of users is social engineering; fake emails from your bank, popup "free virus scans", media plugins, etc. It really only takes one of these infections to sufficiently weaken defenses, then everything can come in.
As for hardware cost, yea you're pretty locked in on Mac. That's why I bought a retail copy of Mac OS and installed it on some custom built hardware. Took me about a month to get all the drivers working, and there's a few minor bugs, but I saved about half the cost of the cheapest Mac (mini) by utilizing existing hardware and buying compatible (usually something similar to Intel and nVidia reference design) hardware.
In my opinion, and I yews all three on a regular basis, Windows, Mac, and Linux are similar in features, security, and usability for your "average consumer". Mac provides the nicest looking and most simplified GUI for accomplishing common tasks. Windows provides the widest variety of software for accomplishing nearly any task you can think of. Linux is a cheap and frequently viable replacement for either, though I'd say it's still beyond the ability of the average consumer to administrate (not yews). For the 95% of users that check email, check sports scores, play Farmwille on Facebook, and print pictures from their camera, any of these are reasonable options.
