It's not so bad when you use it a little bit. Then again, I do have a real Mac, and deal with a few Mac-dominant customers at work, so that probably helps.
The main reason that I'd probably advise against getting a Hackintosh together is the amount of work involved. While it's a bit easier than it was when I first tried it out (my old computer had an ideal combination of hardware...I was very lucky) it's still rather error-prone (for example, I have to limit the usable RAM to 2GB on my system, otherwise I'm plagued with kernel panics). The further you deviate from Apple's specs the harder it gets (my video card was kind of a pain to get working, and nForce motherboards, like mine, can be problematic).
My main motivation for getting OS X working is so that I can play around with it at home. Like I said, I still have a real Mac, but it's rather old (QuickSilver model with a PowerPC G4 733MHz), can only run Tiger, and is about as slow as a original Pentium running Windows XP. Seriously, it's godawful. But yeah, I wanted to get a Leopard system together so that I could learn about it. I'm going to try to get Snow Leopard on it next, though I have a feeling my chipset is going to cause me more grief. Oh well, the next board I get (when I upgrade to a Core i7 or whatever fancy new CPU they have at the time) will probably have an Intel chipset. I haven't been too impressed with the nForce chipset in general.