You are assuming that Apple did not do their homework. Everyone in the cell phone industry assumed the same thing, and I can assure that the original iPhone did every single thing that Apple claimed it did; and it quite honestly made other phones look like junk technology.
Apparently folks from Pixar are going to be doing demos later this week showcasing the new machine, I may be wrong, but I think the folks at Pixar are really into "high-end" computer graphics.
Everyone assumes Steve would not approve; you really think they developed this from the time Steve passed until know, no I don't think that is the case, Steve was involved in this.
I am excited that for once Apple is releasing a machine with real workstation graphics and supporting the latest OpenGL standard and people who business relies on graphical horsepower are bitching. Get real. Ok I get it that Adobe uses CUDA instead of OpenCL, but I will put a big guess that Creative Cloud is using OpenCL by the time this is released. And in the long run it makes more sense for Adobe to switch to OpenCL since it works on both AMD and nVidia -- putting all your eggs in one basket is never a wise decision.
The first time AJA Video released the Io brand of Firewire based capture devices; that pretty much signaled to me that the days of internal PCI cards was going to be dead soon, and how many times have we been burned when card interface technology changed? NuBus -> PCI -> PCI-X (for like 1.5 years) -> PCI express. The promise seems to be that as Thunderbolt matures, it will remain backwards compatible; we shall see.
-mark