And, Intel was on a meltdown path with their CPUs (power-hogs) as well. I'd be curious if it was Apple that convinced them to head down the 'core' path of lower power, or if that had been in the plans before Apple started down that path. It was widely believed, at the time, that speed was the problem, but actually the last G5s were ahead of the Intel counterparts. Apple just saw the writing on the wall about that not being sustainable.
And, it will be interesting to see where this goes in the future, as it seems the old RISC debate is surfacing again concerning the future for speed gains, while maintaining power consumption.
I wonder, if IBM did deliver on it's promises to Apple and even surpassed them, if we'd still be using PowerMacs today or would we still end up Intel? I remember the rumours that while the G5 was supposedly still #1 at Apple, there was a "secret" project going on to get OS X onto Intel based machines.