Do the Unix utilities come with MacOS X?
OS X comes with a fair number of things. For instance, the app Terminal is your command line interface should you need it (you might already know this). It not only lets you do a lot of standard Unix commands, it lets you drag files or folders on to the window to automatically create a reference to the location of that object in the command line. An example is if you're going to FTP something: once you've typed in "put " you can drag the file you want to upload into the Terminal window so that it says "put /Users/blah/Documents/whatever.jpg" instead of having to type it out yourself.
A number of Unix functions also have Apple-made graphical front-ends to them. You can use Network Utility if you want to perform a WHOIS or a traceroute. Disk Utility handles repairing permissions, and using Get Info on a file will let you modify the individual permissions for that file without having to use "chown" or "chmod."
It's not always installed by default, but one important thing to note is that X11 comes with OS X (and can be downloaded for free from Apple if you don't want to fish out your install CDs). So long as a Linux/Unix app is compiled for PowerPC chips, there's a real possibility that it'll run. Efforts like
the Fink Project are also there to help get a lot of apps from other Unix variants (or just x86 versions of BSD apps) working in OS X.
As far as the iMac G5 goes, it depends on what you'll be using it for. It's most definitely not a gaming machine (unless you tend to stick to older games), but for most anything short of the hardest number crunching it'll definitely be a step up from your 1.6 GHz Pentium 4. As a general rule, think of a G5 as being roughly 50 to 66 percent faster than a Pentium 4 at the same speed. It can vary depending on how well-optimized a program is for OS X and the G5 in particular.
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