@johnpowell It won’t run on a Hackintosh?
Apple really has a limited lineup. If you go Mac, it all basically boils down to how large a display you need. And if you want to develop iPad apps, then you need OS X; as stated above, xCode is OS X-only.
All of the other things can easily be done on either a Mac, or on a PC running either Windows or Linux. If you ditch the need for iPad app development, you could actually do the other stuff better for about half the price.
Where it gets tricky is the aforementioned “Hackintosh”, which is a PC that runs OS X. However, that is a little tricky to set up, so I won’t get too far into those, except to say that it is the first thing that sprang to my mind. Hey, you asked, “What are your thoughts?”! Then there is the possibility of a PC running one of the many, many, many types of emulators or Virtual Machines out there. Granted, Apple doesn’t like that, but they dislike many other things too, like using desktop-grade graphics chips instead of laptop GPUs that only perform ¼ to ½ as well.
It all boils down to priorities. What sort of budget are you on; is money a priority? How important is the iPad app development compared to the rest of the stuff? The two are almost mutually exclusive, actually. How much graphical prowess do you need? What are your priorities?