The scientific community and the academic community are deeply interconnected. Given Apple's strength in the education market, it's not surprising they are better represented in the scientific community than in the general business arena.
At my startup here in San Francisco, the Mac is the company standard, and that's consistent with most tech startups in the Bay Area. We're not religious about this, and two of of our 30+ employees actually opted to use Windows, primarily because Excel for Mac is so far behind the Windows version (we buy the licenses, but they are on their own for installing it and supporting themselves). We don't have centralized account management or directory services, but our IT is either cloud-based, web-based internal apps coded to web standards (we don't test on IE, so if they run Windows they have to use Chrome/Firefox) or SSH to UNIX (Solaris) machines. In practice, it's BYOD except the company is paying for the devices. It all works far more smoothly than my previous startup where we ran Windows and had 2 full-time IT people supporting it.
There are places where regulatory requirements (e.g. HIPAA or banking regulations) require a locked-down environment with Active Directory and Policy Editor, but in this era of cloud services the client OS is much less relevant than it used to be. I thought it was a cliche, but I have been at a corporate IT shop where the admins didn't bother to conceal that job security was the main reason why they pushed Microsoft and Oracle technologies.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
