looking into the crystal ball...
whats going to be announced will all be driven by the desire to keep the apple brand untarnished, so they will try to keep end-users, buyers and developers happy. hence the announced smooth long-term transition phase. such transitions have been done before, not only by Apple but also Digital, HP, SGI, SUN, etc. etc.. and they all had long lead-times in common.
- move to intel x86 processors mid 2006 for the notebooks
- improved ibook and powerbooks running G4 NOW, so that their sales don't collapse, possibly with dual-core
- dual-core PowerMac and iMac soon so that those sales don't collapse either
- apple will continue to build their own machines with their own motherboards etc but will base this on intel chipsets, having control over the hardware people use is vital for this effort.
- macosx will only run on those machines, not sure about macosx server..
- developers can get prototype machines running intel processors soon, maybe via a pci daughterboard (?)
- steve will show a prototype, possibly the machine that they will make accessible to developers
- xcode 2.0 will be able to cross-build for all platforms and produce fat binaries
- some sort of built-in processor emulation for the apps that can not be ported
- move the rest of the line beginning of 2007, well in advance of longhorn
I think this is how its going to turn out and if so, I'm pretty sure it's going to be a big success.