Having replaced my 12" PB's hard drive earlier this week, realized that I forgot to take all of the rubber stops off the old drive, and then disassembled the computer AGAIN in order to get the damned rubber stops in... I do think that the process is far more time-consuming than it should be and requires keeping track of way more little tiny screws than necessary.
However, it is not actually difficult to do. It just takes, say, 2 hours to replace the hard drive on a PB instead of the 5 minutes it might take on a Dell.
And if time is the only difference, then that's a really silly reason not to get a Mac. In exchange for 3+ years of having a PB run problem-free, I had to spend an extra 115 minutes of time to replace the hard drive when it dies. If I'd been using a cheapo Dell laptop instead, then I would have spent far more than 115 minutes over 3 years doing virus/spyware/adware scans, doing random hardware troubleshooting, and downloading new drivers for hardware from the different vendor websites. I'd much rather take my annoyingly-long hard drive installation procedure, thank you very much.