Hi Mary,
Like you I finally had enough of the shenanigans of my Windows 7, Dell Laptop 18 months ago. It became a real millstone around my neck.
I decided to give Apple a go and bought a MacBook Pro, which I've since upgrade to 16 GBytes of memory and a 512 GByte SSD. Although, for my everyday purposes the standard configuration was fine, it was when I started taking the Laptop to work and required Windows 7 to run on it in a VM Ware virtual machine that I realised more grunt was required.
As I work in IT I do need to run Windows and various compatible applications from time to time so, as mentioned above, I run MacOS, Windows 7 and Windows 8 simultaneously, using VM Ware ($40 from the AppStore). I did look at other virtual machine alternatives too but I'm very happy with this setup.
I haven't looked back, although I will have to say that it is like learning to ride a bicycle again switching from Windows to MacOS. BTW, MacOS is nothing like iOS on your iPAD et al from a user interface point of view, however, it is just as reliable and intuitive - it just works.
The old Dell Laptop is collecting dust in a drawer. When I started it after 12 months in a drawer it took a whole weekend of my attention to keep updating this, that and the other. That did it, it's back in the drawer.
You can run just about all MS Office apps natively on the Mac, although I run them in Windows in a virtual machine. Funnily enough too, since the RAM and SSD upgrade, Windows 7 runs considerably faster in a virtual machine (1 CPU core and 4 GByte memory) on the Mac than it did on my old Dell with 4 CPU cores and 8 Gbyte memory). With this setup, you can run MacOS and Windows simultaneously as well as share files in between Windows and MacOS and copy & paste. Apple also provides "BootCamp", which prompts you at start-up to boot either Windows or MacOS - but they won't run simultaneously then.
A couple of things that I miss with the old Windows machine is the expanded keyboard (page up, down, home and end keys to name a few) and Windows Explorer. Apples Finder and various third party applications cannot compare and you'll have to get used to different ways of operating without knowing the shortcut keys and managing your files. But I don't miss the unreliability and slowness.
In summary, it just works ! None of this nonsense with pop-up windows and wasting your time with managing the PC. It should just bl**dy well work, right ?
If you ask me, would I make the same choice again after 18 months of experience, the answer would be "Yes and I'd make the decision more confidently". I'm very happy with my MacBook Pro.
Wish you luck ... and patience in the first few weeks.