If you are trying get OSX on an arbitrary piece of hardware, it could take quite a bit of effort and have any number of weird problems, as you suggest. However

If you are trying get OSX on an arbitrary piece of hardware, it could take quite a bit of effort and have any number of weird problems, as you suggest. However, if you stick to known hardware (mainly this means specific motherboards with well supported chipsets) it's quite straight forward and reliable. If you're starting out without existing hardware, just stick to the known MBs and you shouldn't have any issues. Very dependable hardware lists are available at tonymac and osx86 project, just use that. Hardware support has come a long, long way in the past few years.