Actually they are not that bad to work on (experience required), i have taken apart and replaced parts on quite a few, (not just ram, hdd) i have worked on MUCH worse ...
I must say, replacing a mainboard on an IBM/Lenovo on a monday morning will cause you greif, they have about 2 extra layers of stuff to screw down, but i am glad they do. Even there monitors have twice as many screws in them.
I have an HP TC4200 (my firewall OBSD 4.6) that has come apart about 6 different times (soldered power connecter to mainboard, some other misc fixxing) that was easy to work on. Also some of the Dell's at work are quite pleasureful to work on, at least they tag the sizes/lengths of screws on most laptops
I had an OLD Macbook PPC 100mhz back when
it actually unfolded apart (outwards) and you unscrewed parts, i recall that one was very easy to work on, the parts cost an arm and a leg though.
Just need to stay away from the Samsung HDD with an Apple sticker on it (100$ CDN) the regular Samsung HDD (60$ CDN, exact same HDD - the Apple sticker) or WD or any 2.5" HDD works fine, i am so glad Apple switched to standard commodity (if i can call them that) hardware.
Apple did a good thing with the hardware switch, that attracted ALOT more technical persons that will run non-MacOS operating systems (Windoz/Linux/Unix) on there Mac's. This i believe will bring greater credability and technical usage from persons that are not Macophiles (you know the ones who get there facts from TV commercials) almost a relief ..... almost.
Although i used to LOVE my Toshiba laptops (had 5 over the years), there quality has gone to shit (even the Tecra's, i used to really like those), and Acer laptops too, those 2 are built like crap, barely held together and flimsy as hell, the parts they are using i was replacing almost every few months for some of our coorporate clients. It is quite a pain to drive 1-2 hours to get on site and tear apart a brand new laptop just to replace a monitor and ram (or cpu fan or wifi/bluetooth module) in a crappier (meaning more used and worse shape) laptop (30 mins work) just to drive 1-2 hours back.
I sold my Macbook (white) with XPPro on it bout 2 months ago (sold my MacBook Pro last christmas) raw metal install no BootCamp (i used there drivers of course) and now i run OS 10.6.2 in a virutal machine (VMWare) so really, for me that is, my Macbook running OpenBSD and MacOS in a virtual machine seems a better setup *_*