Couldn't exchange data???? Come up to the 21sr century, amigo!!
For one thing a modern mac will run Windows, any flavor you like, and in many case run it faster than a Wintel machine. For another thing, the major office applications are all cross-compatible anymore, especially the ones using XML structure. This whole notion is pretty much an urban legend. There may be some dedicated applications that won't play across the platforms but RTF, Word, Excel, Power POint files zip over and open up happily.