What do I Buy to Run PC Apps?

Actually I would try out those apps in Codeweaver's Crossover. MS Office and Photoshop are completely supported. That way you don't have to fork over the dough for a copy of XP or Vista. If that's not adequate, I totally recommend VMWare Fusion. I think it performs better than Parallels and is backed by a much better company. VMWare has been a pioneer in the virtualization market and has a lot of experience. In Fusion's short life it already has more powerful features than Parallels ever had, and it support multiple cores!

If you plan on running Photoshop, Boot Camp is what you need.

In Benchmark testing, Photoshop runs slowly on Parallels and Fusion.

CNET Benchmarks:
http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6546370.html

http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9760910-1.html

Peter's Laws number 2. http://www.art.com/asp/sp-asp/_/pd--10001844/Peters_Laws.htm

The "Standard Apps : MS Office, mail, Photoshop, etc."
I was under the impression that these were available for OS X.
Also the Cisco VPN Client, I thought Equinux.com had something that did the Cisco VPN Client,..
(as a well as almost every other vpn except the Nortel/Apani) called "VPN Tracker", and isn't there
a native Cisco VPN Client for OS X, available from Cisco?

Now as for native PC Apps, where I used to work, The "Linux only" crowd needed run various
proprietary Windows only apps, so these were setup on Citrix servers, which of course has
a Mac OS X client. The advantage to this, or a Windows Remote Desktop, type setup, is that the
PC/Server hosting the application is the one that is sucking back all the CPU horsepower, and not
the CPU mojo on your MAC.