Depends on what you mean by better hardware. The specs will probably be better, I have a Thinkpad and it would have cost me twice as much for an equivalent Macbook. That said, the build quality of the Thinkpad isn't even close to the MacBook, it just depends on what's important to you. For me, an aluminium case isn't worth $1500, and I don't really want to be seen with an Apple product anyway :)
Well with the thinkpads and other business-centric laptops you tend to get the advantage of modularity as well. Keyboards, screens, hard drives, RAM, batteries, and optical drives can all be replaced fairly easily on Dell Latitudes and Lenovo Thinkpads. (The ones I've had at least.) On a Macbook, replacing the RAM and hard drive are the only ones I know to be fairly simple.
Is this at all true? If you spent an identical sum of money on a PC would you not get better hardware?