This is where the Hackintosh market has thrived. For desktop users, size of the machine is not nearly as important as raw. computational. power. The iMac was good in its time but that time was half a decade ago. The Mac Pro was supposed to be the revolution for Mac desktops, but they neglected it for too long. And since you can't upgrade it yourself that shiny new Mac depreciates exponentially and even more so when s…
A maxed out current iMac is a pretty competitive workstation machine imo. Not especially cheap , but not prohibitive for a company. The top of the line is currently a 4.0 GHz quad-core i7 w/ 32 GB RAM (27" model w/ the memory and CPU upgrades). I have that on my desk at work and am quite happy with it.
That top of the line iMac costs four grand while a Hackintosh costs half that and gets you a top of the line graphics card and the ability to keep on par with the top of the line.