Re: Bassackwards
""It wasn't my assertion,"
Maybe you should have put quotes around it then."
No, you misunderstood what I wrote. I am not the person who wrote the post containing that assertion. Thus, "it wasn't my assertion".
You're still confused about the difference between the price of media and the software licence. You do not own OS software - the producer simply grants you a licence to use it. (Linux people stop sniggering - you also don't "own" your software; if you did, you'd be able to resell it under whatever licence terms you wanted). In this case, the producer is Apple, and the terms of the licence are on that panel that you clicked through without reading. Here, have a look at it now: http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/OSX1010.pdf
The licence states several times that you are only permitted to use it on "Apple branded hardware". If you run OS X on a non-Apple product, you are in violation of the licensing terms, and have no right to use the software. It doesn't matter that you've paid Apple money, you are still in breach of the terms of the licence, and if Apple ever found a way to make such an OS X system stop working, they would be entirely within their legal rights to deploy it.
You can buy it separately, it's no different to Windows or Linux.
Okay. Here are the two fundamental differences that you're missing:
1. You can buy Windows or Linux licences and use them on any hardware of your choice - if you get it to install on a system, the licence permits you to use it on that hardware. But: You cannot buy an OSX licence and use it on any hardware of your choice. Only installation onto Apple-branded hardware is permitted. OS X is legally tied to Apple hardware only.
2. You can buy or build a bare PC system, and then decide what OS you want to run on it. But: every single hardware model that Apple permits you to install OSX onto is already shipped from the factory with that software pre-installed, and so the cost of developing OSX is included in the device price. OS X is bundled, without choice, onto every device that is allowed to run it.