You've probably heard of the announcement by a company called Psystar, to offer a Mac-clone with a $399 price tag, dubbed "Open Computer." It's not quite clear if that product really exists, and there have been some reports about weird things going on around the company (e.g., they seem to enjoy moving around their Miami homebase quite a bit).

Regardless of whether Psystar's endeavors will result in a shipping product, would you generally consider buying a Mac-clone?

If so, under what conditions -- e.g., if Apple would sanction this (not all that likely, of course...) -- and for what reasons would you prefer a third-party "Mac" over the original: is it just the price or is there more to, like better expandability or better components?

I got a MacBook Pro for just over $4000 last fall. At the time I could have purchased a PC notebook with comparable specs for about half that but my day job requires me to be able to test our products on OS X. Obviously I could have bought a Mac Mini or even an iMac for a lot less money but they're not portable. So I dropped the big $$ on the real deal.

If a portable Mac clone had been available, sanctioned by Apple or not, I probably would have purchased it instead simply because it would have been cheaper.