Actually, I have it on pretty good info that the switch to Copper over Optical was Apple's idea
No. This is publically released information directly from Intel. An optical connection would have been ~10x more expensive than copper using today's technology. It wouldn't have been affordable to squeeze into a consumer product.
Besides, Apple lacks the know-how to make these kind of decisions. Intel has the best silicon engineers on the planet, and they're the party that developed thunderbolt, and they made the call.
and they also drove the name change since Lightpeak would have been hard to explain without an optical connection!
Lightpeak was just a development code name, rest assured it was never intended to be the final name for the interface. Intel always has development code names for their products, for example the original core i7 was called Nehalem, then came Lynnfield, and now Sandy Bridge, next is Ivy Bridge next year, then Haswell, and so on and so forth.
Now, Apple may well have been the ones who picked thunderbolt as the actual name, but that doesn't mean much in the big scheme of things.
I am interested in having a second big bandwidth bus running on my Laptop for audio applications
Audio doesn't actually need much bandwidth, you could fit hundreds of CD-quality audio channels within a couple megabytes per second. Thunderbolt-based audio would be rather overkill, like killing mosquitos with cannonfire.
There are good USB2 sound solutions, and probably stuff for firewire as well (but that's probably more expensive since it's not as common an interface); either would be quite sufficient for audio needs...
Thunderbolt disk I/O will arrive in due time, if you don't want to buy that ridiculously expensive RAID enclosure whatsitscalled, that I think is for sale right now actually...
