I don't remember any kind of Apple cult; though I do remember that most people felt some pride about working for the company and that they felt they were creating a "quality" product.
Despite having spent most of my working life writing for programmers and having written the low level debugging manual for Apple's ex OS, I do not consider myself all that technical. Ask Chuck Grimes; he'll tell you how utterly lame I am. But....here's my take on the Mac/PC question.
I did not find learning the Mac all that intuitive, but once I got a basic sense of things, I found it very easy to work with it. The Mac I bought and used for over ten years never had any problems and never crashed. In fact, all the equipment I bought from Apple was reliable and long lasting. (I had a laser printer for close to fifteen years that never needed anything except toner.) In the meantime, my ex ( a PC man) seemed to need a new computer every four years or so. When he had to add hardware, he would have to take the whole thing apart and sweat over it for days. When I added new hardware, I just had to plug it in.
I documented a lot of the Mac OS and Open Transport, and it seemed that developers took some trouble to come up with elegant and fairly easy to use API's. I also think the idea of resources as a mode of extensibility was really cool.
I am actually not that interested in computers although I'm interested in some of the things they can do: web page building, music editing, film editing, etc. For the last ten years, I have been forced to work on a PC at work. If I were to buy a computer (I have never actually bought one), I'm pretty sure I'll buy a Mac (with a backup drive and extended warrantee because the hardware is not all that it used to be.) I'd buy the Mac because I think it provides the best value and ease of use.
One other thing: using the Mac was the first time in my life that I had the experience where "making something easy to use" resulted in creating something better rather than something stupider. And, I do think there's great value in creating a computer that people can use to do most of what they want to do.
I understand nerd frustration about not being able to totally get into it; but now that it's UNIX-based, that problem has gone away....right?
Joanna