I bought a newton to see how it worked and have been hooked on it
I learned UNIX on telnet terminal sessions actually which was just like opening the terminal in OS X.
Other than that, this year I "graduated" to using a desktop too. If you've ever used linux and GNOME, its kinda sorta like that but a little more minimalistic (the OpenWindows environament that is).
GNOME is coming to solaris by the next release as far as I know. So no need to buy a sun machine to see how the OS works.
If you have a spare PC kicking around you can get the software from sun (its free but there is a media charge of $70 because you get something like 15 CDs). There is an x86 version of the software out

(I have Solaris 7 loaded on VPC, sort of slow, but its nice to play around with)
Admiral