Very true. PCs ship with lowest-common-denominator powered speakers and noisy headphone outs. The average customer and even the gaming customer doesn't seem to care much. People who do get USB output devices or send SPDIF to their existing surround system. Maybe Macbooks are less bad at this?
Macbooks are indeed great at this. They can output 24 bit 48khz IIRC. And I'm pretty sure there's even DSP in there to model the resonances of the case and cancel them out when using the speakers.
And BTW gaming motherboards now commonly have audio interfaces with isolated power rails and stuff.
The real benefits of a macbook is the 192 kHz (on recent models) tosLink optical out integrated into the headphone jack, which is just an awesome feature that I really wish other laptop manufacturers would pick up.
DSPs for resonances/tuning has however been picked up pretty widely (under a wide variety of brandings/quality)
