Who said anything about skimping on hardware ? My point was that you don't get the same horse power for price ratio on an apple laptop that you get from a Windows laptop. As for support it depends on your geographical location. You were able to get your mac air replaced thrice within 24 hours each time and I get similar support for my Windows laptops. It took me 4 days just to get a human being to respond to a problem I had with apple up-to-date support.

Developer time is more valuable than hardware costs hands down. The horse power that you can back in return for that hardware cost varies between apple and windows.