If it happened it'd be too little, too late
There are many Mac owners who are very pleased with Macintosh hardware.
I wasn't one of them. I found every machine I used unreliable, and Apple's keyboards and mice woefully substandard. And, worst of all, this manifested itself most on their laptops. I cannot type on my Powerbook at any speed. And the trackpad is the mouse-replacement from hell.
I switched back to GNU/Linux around three years ago, buying a Thinkpad T60 and enjoying the benefits of an open operating system while suffering the geek-lead UI and attitudes towards software reliability and integration.
But then came Ubuntu. It "just worked". I missed having menus at the top of the screen as with Mac OS X, and I would prefer applications to be self-contained folders visible on the filesystem rather than the abomination that is packages, but Ubuntu is, after Mac OS X, clearly the second best desktop operating system in the world. Once installed and set up correctly, it is easier to use than Windows and comes a close second to OS X. To an advanced user it could even be said to be a little more efficient. In some areas, ironically related to the package management system, it's even just a little bit better.
And so we're talking about the vague possibility that at some point in the distant future Apple might possibly consider thinking about organizing some kind of meeting where an item on the agenda may allude to the concept of perhaps running Mac OS X on a machine that isn't made by Apple.
But it will not be open like Ubuntu. It will require regular payment of $130 if you don't want Apple's updates to stop working. If there's a problem, neither you nor a community of the smartest people in the world will be able to do anything about it, you'll have to live with Apple's decisions. And the "best case" scenario has it that Apple sells Mac OS X to end users just as Microsoft does Windows, but the "best case" is quite possibly not even on the agenda, with Apple doing a deal with Dell and leaving Lenovo in the cold, or vice-versa, or possibly worse.
It's surprising how much better Free Software operating systems like Ubuntu are today in comparison with the mainstream proprietary systems. There's no question in my mind that anyone spending money on Vista or XP for any purpose other than to retain compatibility with a handful of proprietary applications they can't replace is doing themselves no favours whatsoever. Is Ubuntu better than Mac OS X? In some areas, yes it is. In others, it falls short.
For me, I've made my choice. Apple is going to have to come up with something beyond compelling for me to consider switching back. And yes, they're going to have to let me choose my own hardware. This doesn't sound like enough.
