Mac or PC for grunt work

[Maccess]

I was wondering what's the prevailing consensus among Mac videographers about using PCs for grunt work: e.g. converting between codecs, encoding, even burning volume copies.

Several videographers I know edit videos on Macs but do this kind of grunt work on a PC for a variety of reasons:

1) Raw horsepower is available cheaply.
2) More codecs available
3) Hardware accelerated cards, etc.