Some people really aren't getting the big picture here.
First, the clips that some people are complaining about are HD clips. Keep that in mind. Do you actually comprehend what it takes to do full quality playback of HD video? These aren't the little 320x240 video clips that we're used to downloading from the internet, folks. You have to be crazy to expect a lot of older hardware to be able to play these things. HD video isn't about shoestringing the stuff into old hardware, it is about creating video content for new hardware and the future. When DVD came out, could you just pop it into any old CD player and expect it to play? No. It was new technology that required bigger and better technology to take advantage of it. Same with HD video content. Anybody who is pissed at Apple because they aren't making HD video play on your old 1GHz G4 processor simply does not understand the situation.
As well, H.264 does not equal HD video. They aren't the same thing. H.264 is a new version of MPEG4 that can be scaled from small video and file sizes up to high definition video. H.264 makes it possible to easily present HD video in file sizes sane enough to distribute over the internet or other means, but that is not H.264's sole purpose. For example, I just last night encoded a music video off of a DVD into H.264. Using H.264, I ended up with a video that was 640x480 and 55MB in size, compared to the old version of the same video encoded in MPEG1 that was 320x240 and 88MB in size. While H.264 can be used for HD video, it can also be used for things like that where you want bigger resolution, better video quality, and smaller file sizes for non-HD content.
Finally, to hit the point again, anybody who is wanting Apple to "fix" H.264 video, especially HD video, to work on older computers does not understand the situation. H.264 is not Apple's codec, for starters. Beyond that, "fixing" it would defeat the entire point of H.264. The purpose of the codec is to get better quality video files than what we had before. To achieve that, better hardware is required. If you want to dumb down H.264 to play on any machine, then just use an older, less capable codec instead.