If you have had experience with setting up OSX as an internet server you would likely find out that you have the exact same things to deal with that you do in Linux (except more because of not fully ported software and less people running it in such a situation). Just because you pay more money doesn't mean what you attempting to accomplish is going to be easier or better.
There's not much to setting up sendmail. Most distributions are configured for what you need out of the box, at most adding a param or two to the sendmail.mc file. Same with Apache, imap, pop, ftp, etc, etc. It's certainly not rocket science, as a matter of fact it's stupid simple. And you certainly are not limited to Sendmail, there are several mailers out there. And what do you think you'll be running on OSX? Likely the same services.
Hell, most likely if you are a n00b you are going to want to install Webmin even on the Mac to configure these services, in which case it doesn't matter whether the underlying OS is Linux/OSX/BSD/Solaris/AIX/etc. In webmin it all looks pretty much the same. So again, don't waste the money if you are going to run a web server, you will gain absolutely nothing and probably lose out on quite a bit.
Now, if you want to discuss destop systems I won't argue with you over that. I would imagine that people might have an easier time with OSX in that regard and spending the money may be beneficial to them depending on what their needs are.
[ January 26, 2003: Message edited by: void main ]