Apple is pushing Thunderbolt because it probably has some degree of control over the developing process and/or the technology uses some of its patents. Perhaps it's not a matter of functionality.
Well yeah, I mentioned that it worked for what they had in mind. They got a docking station and raid out of it so far. They were able to run it over a port (mini displayport) that was already included in the design. They have one patent there, and intel isn't completely tied to its use. They could opt to go with something different.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_DisplayPort
Wiki is quite accurate on this one, so I'm using it
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Shortly after announcing the Mini DisplayPort, Apple announced that it would license the connector technology with no fee.[5] Apple reserves the right to void the license should the licensee "commence an action for patent infringement against Apple".
Mini displayport is actually pretty decent. It's a very small port. It doesn't support a couple things, such as 10 bit displayport. Apple doesn't care as they have no intention of supporting that anyway. It worked with one or two cards under Leopard. Since then it doesn't work at all. This kind of annoys me. It almost makes me want to run bootcamp, but not quite. I have everything basically set the way I want it in OSX, although I'm considering rolling back to SL. Even with 16GB of ram, Lion is way too hungry. The ssd helps somewhat, but certain things require real memory. Some of the things I use have the potential to be memory hogs, and I prefer to concern myself with memory management more than necessary.