I’ve used a variety of means to migrate from one Mac to another over the years:
- Manually copy stuff over and do clean reinstalls.
- Clone the HD from one machine to another.
- And today, I used the migration assistant.
I imagine the migration assistant is great for most folks, but it’s less than ideal for web developers that have installed and configured *nix tools like SVN, MySQL, PHP, etc. I’ve had to reinstall these by hand - nice to be forced to upgrade I suppose. 
Based on my experience today, I’d recommend that developers use 1 or 2 above rather than 3. Your choice will largely depend on how much you want to maintain your current set-up rather than starting fresh, but also could be influenced by moving from a G4/G5 machine to an Intel machine. A clean install or migration is probably better than the clone option when changing to a different chip.
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Shawn Blanc adds this Comment:
I just ordered a Mac Pro and am switching from my PowerBook and was considering how I wanted to migrate.
Manual transfer and a clean install of all my apps will be time consuming but the best choice too, I think.
May 24th, 2007 at 8:13 pm
Jijesh adds this Comment:
I just got a new HD for my ibook…I had backed up my disk to Amazon S3.
May 24th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
PatrickQG adds this Comment:
I went for the migration assistant - which failed miserably on my Aperture library (that puppy is big), so I ended up not bringing my own user account over and just copying my home folder manually - but it did the hard work (copying apps over, and bringing most of the licenses with them), even brought across my changes to sudoers.
I, consequently, haven’t really dealt with a fresh install of OS X in two years… made setting up a naked machine at work for a colleague feel very strange.
The only thing I found that caused the odd bit of oddness was Virtual PC - it had kernel extensions (that were ignored, I think), and some kind of file system/disk driver bundle for the disk images it creates. Until I cleared that off I had small system oddness.
May 25th, 2007 at 12:35 am
Kreig Zimmerman adds this Comment:
One caveat when using Migration Assistant that I discovered… it will not copy over items from an old account to a new account if the account’s name is exactly the same.
When I changed over from my old G5 to my MacBook Pro last winter, I discovered this quirk. In retrospect it was probably better that way. I simply migrated the thngs to a second account on the new laptop and then gradually moved items over as I needed them.
Personally, manual copying seems best. Like so many of these tools, they’re really geared at less advanced users and probably best ignored by the more geek-skilled…
June 3rd, 2007 at 10:38 am
Alex adds this Comment:
Interesting, seemed to work fine for me.
June 3rd, 2007 at 11:58 am
Oliver L. adds this Comment:
How do you know exactly which files to copy over if you’re doing it manually?
June 21st, 2008 at 8:42 am
Alex adds this Comment:
Years of experience I guess.
Generally you should know where any of your *nix tools are and move those. Then you’ve also got your preference and config files in your Users/username/Library to move as well.
June 21st, 2008 at 9:17 am