so if i had one that used standard ram, hard drive, optical drives, and video card... then the only difference in hardware between the mac and a pc would be the motherboard/processor?
You could do that, but Mac mobos dont use standard motherboard mounting points, so unless you have enough skill to drill new ones on your case, I think you should stay away from that. Also, I dont think they sell many
working mobo/proc combos from recent macs. Most people just sell the whole package. If you found a bare mobo with at least a 1GHz G4 in it, then youd be in business.
is that correct? so technically, i could just take the motherboard/cpu out of my pc and replace it with a mac mobo, and i would have a mac then? or am i way off?
You could, but see my above comment. Also, mac internal optical drives are the same as PC ones, but dont have the same firmware as required by the OS. The only ones that do are the Pioneer DVD burners (A03 onward), though I have heard of people putting other optical drives in the second bay of their G4 towers and having them work without a problem. What you would most want is something that works in iTunes (if it works there, it works throughout the system).
also, is there any OS X emulators or other mac OS emulators i can run on my PC to get a feel of what a mac would be like?
No mac emulators, but there are many windows XP skins available that mimick the MacOSX environment (including Dock and most recently Exposé). While they add no mac compatability what so ever, they do add the look of the OS to your windows system.