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OK... where to start. First, I'm a pretty happy Sonar user (since 1996) and I use a MOTU 828mkII.
I say -- and this is something of a general rule for me -- if a person WANTS a Mac or thinks they ought to have a Mac, everything else being equal, they should probably go ahead and do it. Because, otherwise, any little thing that goes wrong with their Windows machine will drive them nuts and they will go around muttering about it and feel hosed.
Now, on the particulars, I'm happy to say that my 828 has been quite stable (USING WDM/KS drivers, mind you! I HAVE had consistent problems with AISO drivers for my MOTU), Sonar has been mostly quite stable (the only problems I've had seem to relate back to the convolution reverb I use, which DID come with Sonar but which was supposedly coded by Voxengo. I use it A LOT and I've only had problems a couple times -- and that MAY actually relate to some tinkering I did within the last few weeks, since things were pretty good before that.)
With regard to latency, I'm afraid ANY Firewire or USB device is going to tend to have more round trip latency than a PCI based converter. That's the nature of the beast.
(Now, there can be a separate issue of what I'll call overdub misalignment. ie, overdubs show up slightly behind where they should be (typically). This has been an ongoing problem with most DAWs that don't otherwise compensate for it (like Cubase with their hardware comp ping-loopback calibration utility or the similar utility in Mackie's Tracktion. I'm TOLD that Sonar 6 has added some sort of utility to deal with that, as well -- "confirmed" by Craig Anderton's EQ review of S6. I haven't used it yet, but Craig's aware of the issues [after a LONG thread in his own forum where no less than CW main man Ron Kuper came in and promised an "interface delay compensation.")
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