I made the switch.

I have no idea why your system is requiring a force quit so often.

And the key combination is simple.

If you want to force quit the entire computer, you just hold the power button down.

If you want to just force quit an application, you hold down the option key and then use the mouse to bring the drop down menu for the application in the dock and choose force quit.

As for Boot Camp, I'd use Parallels instead.