Apple products are priced a little higher than others. This is not news.
Check out this benchmark comparision.
http://ladd.dyndns.org/xbench/merge.xhtml?doc1=129700&doc2=135353
The interesting thing here is this: that Athlon can be picked up with a motherboard at Fry’s for like $400. Wow.
You can even compare that AMD with a Dual G5 and see the same jump in speed over the G5.
When Apple moves to Intel, the older Macs are really going to start looking much paler.