You clearly don't understand how those MacBooks are being used. Hint: you can't buy iRover software from the Mac App Store. A lot of scientific software is written with Unix systems in mind, and could readily be compiled for Linux or Solaris. Macs tend to be popular among scientists because it is based on Unix and is supported by many commercial software vendors.

Besides, it's kinda beside the point in this discussion. If you're going to compare Mac OS X to Windows 8, you may as well throw Linux into the mix too. Android is based upon the Linux kernel after all.