Mind you, it's possible, just possible, that Apple is figuring that obtaining a substantial portion of their profit margin from the iPod will enable them to essentially sell Alienware boxes. Apple-branded PCs, high-end high-quality PCs with a certain design cachet to them, but all standard parts nonetheless, and after a couple of transitional years not architecturally distinguishable from a typical PC in the sense that you can build your own, etc. Except that the OS will not be guaranteed to run except on Apple-branded PCs, so as to save the R & D folks working on the OS a lot of hardware-compatibility headaches. (You wanna swap out your mobo for the latest and greatest from Computer Shopper, it's up to you to get the OS to boot from it, don't whine to Apple).
Five years down the line, it saves Apple from having to defend an increasingly-indefensible position as sole proprietary hardware vendor, lucrative though it's been so far. if they surrender that (gradually) they transition to being one vendor among other PC vendors, one that (like Alienware) specializes in relatively expensive high-end no-compromises boxes, while also being an OS vendor (and their OS, yeah, only certified for Apple hw but can run on your Dell or Sony or Compaq, and is finally going head-to-head with Microsoft's Windows) and meanwhile is feeding its bottom line with lucrative sales of iPods and whatever media-player or environment it spreads/morphs into. (Video, I assume, among other things).
