I had almost exactly the same experience. I had a Mac (Powerbook) for almost 3 years and could get work done, but development was sometimes a hassle where it shouldn't have been (just to upgrade gcc one had to download 2gigs of XCode; installing exotic C/C++ libraries had to be done by hand; any X11-app, like inkscape, is a real pain to use; things like that). And in the end I was only using apps that have a natural home on Linux anyway (vim, latex, ocaml, java, inkscape).

I now run Ubuntu on a Thinkpad and that "Just Works" for development more than the Powerbook ever did.