@eyoungren Your points are well-founded. Only because you asked for opinions pertaining to this subject, I will give you mine in a somewhat condensed format:
As I have stated in the past, I have a continued interest in PowerPC machines not because they are historically affordable examples of Apple when it was great (although that is what initially attracted me as I grew up in an Apple household), but because they are an obscure architecture in the modern landscape oftentimes housed in attractive and / or endearing case designs, both qualities calling back to the high-end Silicon Graphics workstations of the 90's, which I also think were great. The fact that I refer to them as machines and not Macs is indicative of this.
However, they also strike another interest in me because a loaded machine (a mid-tier G4 for example)
does possess the base resources necessary to handle the modern Web at a comfortable or at least acceptable pace, but only after the hardware has been fully leveraged and the software fully optimized to better achieve a desired end result. This is another point of interest, because for some people (as I'm sure others here can attest), it is fun to optimize things; especially when doing so in order to reap said better result out of whatever you're asking the machine to do than it otherwise would have in an unoptimized state. So it is almost like a win-win scenario.
When given that context, it is self-evident as to why Intel Macs do not strike the same chord in me. Their computing power is in greater supply, so they do not require any optimization. Their architecture is not by any means special (which also carries certain consequences for certain use cases), and shortly after the transition, they all assimilated into the exact same black and silver appearance. Which further differentiated them from the concept of individuality, whereas at least the PowerPC machines were segmented into either all-white or all-silver depending on the market any given machine catered to.
As
@AL1630 mentioned, I too have seen increased discussion around early Intel Macs in this forum, with an increasing margin of users inevitably shifting to that platform exclusively. Taking this into account, when it inevitably gets to the point that the PowerPC ecosystem and architecture finds itself a borderline afterthought in a majority of threads and discussions, I will probably stop logging on as the forum's original appeal for me would have at that point left.
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As to the future of PowerPC machines on the Internet, there will inevitably come a point in time where Software Update will stop connecting to Apple's servers, iTunes will cease to connect to the store, Leopard WebKit will not connect to most websites, TenFourFox will become just as limited as Camino 2.1.2 is now, file sharing will become impossible with new environments, Gentoo, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD will drop support, and the renewed Linux activity that began two years ago will die down once more. There will come a certain point in most likely less than 10 years' time that these machines will be useful to most people for exclusively niche offline tasks and that alone, boasting only one very small dedicated online community of diehard users.
I could be wrong of course, I am sure that nobody in 2010 ever expected these things to scream into 2020 with the vengeance that they had. But in any case, I am already pursuing ARM and OpenPOWER platforms in preparation for this. Eventually, I strongly believe that RISC-V will find its way into the mix and grow its market share as well, but it will need to mature for a small period first.
However, I won't soon forget the social interactions and bonds had here over time. To me, they were invaluable; which is something that transcends technology altogether.
