Jeff,
I too have always loved freedom (as in free software), but I think “freedom 0” is exaggerating. Having used a variety of hardware over twenty years and most of the reasonable operating systems, I think that my MacBook is the best tool I’ve ever had, thanks to the closed, proprietary development.
And it allows me to have the best of two worlds.
I can trust that those proprietary pieces of software that I deeply love, Photoshop for one, run smoothly. Then again, as an engineer, I can’t live without my daily dose of TeX and emacs. The choise of building a modern OS on top of the trusted BSD platform is ingenious.