The whole thing with "apple abandoning the pro market to focus on more casual users" is getting as old as "pc gaming is dying and people turn to consoles" and the "grandma's pie is dying because now we can buy pie in supermarket" things.
Seriously it made sense to stop the Xserve lineup, because out there we can find bigger players who use really badass supercomputers (yeah servers like the ones in the apple's data center are supercomputers, because they don't qualify for the top 10 of stronger ones is not a reason to don't count them as SC) like for example oracle and their servers with solaris system.
It even made sense to have mac mini servers which are cheaper, smaller and you add up as your needs expands (or you just do your server thing in home with just one) and I believe they are also less power hungry (when you have a damn room full of server systems, you are the pride of your electricity provider).
It also made sense that they focus on consumer products, because it is a gold vein, and even a big deal of professionals can do just fine with an iMac (graphic designers like me for example can work with a mac mini most of the everyday jobs) and beyond that even people who never used a computer before are likely to get an iDevice (even if in most cases they will have to use a computer in pair with that iDevice).
And finally what it definitely does not made any sense here, is the rumor that the company will abandon pro users.
I believe they need to give some more air to this category to breath (they don't even have a quadro configuration for macpro, even if most of the pro users can find it of great use), but in no way they will turn away from the pro users.
What many people doesn't seem to understand, is that the pro users who prefer macs, prefer them for the easy of use (!) just like the consumers!
The most people tend to believe that pro users are some short of computer freaks who use super advanced things etc.
We the pro users (because I'm also someone who use a mac to earn his living) are not some crazy nerds who we can hack **** and we know everything about computer hardware and other things like that.
We just want a tool for our jobs, a tool that works and requires 0 time for troubleshoting.
Now if the tool is named PowerPC, Macintosh, MacPro, iMac or iWhatever, really, we don't care! As long as the software we need integrates and evolve in the newer devices we are fine.
(Now this may sound like I didn't read what some other professional users wrote above, but I did.
And what I have to tell to them is relax.
Even if they drop the high end stuff like Xserve you don't have to worry. Are you sure you needed something that those machines where able to provide? I mean something that a macmini server can not, even if you have to get 5 of them to much the power of 1 Xserve?
I mean if you need real servers, you most likely know about oracle and the rest of server makers and you don't really believe that the only solutions for you are win2008, linux and OSX server, with whatever hardware those deploy along.
So if you have needs that a macmini or more of them can not cover, then maybe you must look somewhere else for solutions.
Don't take me wrong here, I just point out the obvious, people tend to buy things that doesn't really need.
Also for the final cut thing, I don't know how it works, and I hope I understand what you are talking about, but as far as I know most applications can do render-farming with machines with other OS and their counterpart for that OS, now if final cut is only compatible only with mac, then I guess you have to stick with a mac pro render farms.
Come to think of it I really don't understand, you bought Xservers to make final cut pro render-farms? I though they are way too "slow" in comparison with any other macpro setup and as of that they are not a good idea for that job.)
Forgive me any typing mistakes, or even misunderstandings, I haven't slept long last night.
