As I said, they could take the iPad and hook it up, just say it was a real iMac. They could start on the OS for the iPad and make it just look more like a full OS for desktops.
My thoughts above were just imagination as an outcome of my fear for more things from apple that I do not like. I get this paranoia since there are people all the way saying "Oh, I definitely would buy an iMac touch" (not seeing how ridiculous it is to leave your fingerprints everywhere on the screen were you want to look at it while working).
I totally agree, but there are those other people that like not so useful things.
I work for an Apple Specialist, and I can tell you, every single day, I have to clean fingerprints off the 27" iMac. Really obvious, repeated ones right on the Dock. A lot of people just don't understand that iPad isn't a Mac.
Every day, I hear comments, "does it have a touchscreen yet?" and "probably next year."
Ironically, of the same token, also every single day, people ask me if the Magic Mouse works on the iPad, which sounds to me an awful lot like using chopsticks to eat Rice Krispies.
Despite this, I have to say that I don't think your paranoia is well-founded. Apple has *never* been one to cowtow to what customers
say they want. They've always been a company that does its best to figure out what customers really need, and providing them with that instead. And at the end of the day, everyone usually ends up better off.
Apple was aware of the "tablet PCs" that were on the market for years and years before the iPad came out. There is a reason they didn't make them then, and it's the same reason they won't make them now: operating systems designed to work with a mouse do not function well with touch screens, and vice versa. Apple wouldn't have bothered to make iOS if they thought this wasn't the case. And they wouldn't have spent millions creating the best possible trackpad experience if it wasn't the case. If you read Steve Jobs's "Thoughts on Flash," he clearly lays this out.
Now, what we
might see re: "touch" Macs are things like further expansion of the trackpad experience. I'd *love* to see a Safari for Mac that scales up smoothly the way MobileSafari does, rather than basically activating the "CMD+/CMD-" menu option. I also daresay there will be further and better Multitouch support across the line of Apple apps. I'll bet your boots (not mine, I like mine) that FCP8 takes advantage of these gestures; maybe even better Cocoa APIs for integrating them into third-party software
