I think that this is a side effect of the "be where the puck is going to be" Apple philosophy.
The problem with this paradigm is that consumers (and especially in the current economy) aren't about to go buy a new Camcorder every 18 months and so forth, so Apple's problem is not in as much as future anticipation as it is in a failing to "Stay the Course" with robust legacy support until something clearly superior becomes available.
For example, for my next laptop, there's simply no way in Hades that I'd buy the current Unibody MacBook, due to its lack of FW. Now we roll the dice: do I go upscale to the MBP or downscale to the plastic MB?
The real answer is neither: Apple lost the sale entirely.
Why? Because there actually were more options available.
Agreed - its yet another manifestation of the old MHz myth, where the consumer desire to oversimplify to more easiliy compare products makes a choice to ignore non-equal factors because the comparison would otherwise become a "Too Hard".
Plus, the technical reality is that while eSATA does offer great transfer rates, it isn't quite all that its cracked up to be -- they've only just releatively recently finally beaten down their adoption barrier of customer confusion that was incurred due to their initial lack of a standard plug interface (External SATA is not eSATA)...and while eSATA seems to look good for this instant, the bigger picture is that their interface protocol lacks inclusion of power, and their Standards Body is about to go around the same "what's the standard?" Do-Loop a second time as they now are trying to figure out how to revise the eSATA interface to include power. Their challenge is that there's already a couple of (incompatible to each other) eSATA+Power plug implimentations out on the market already, but since they're patented, it effectively makes adoption as an open standard nearly impossible. Golly, wonderful.
Moving back to FW, the generic problem with Firewire right now is IMO in the details of the controller chips and peripherals (in the context of eSATA competition). For going up to FW1600 / FW3200 ... I suspect that a sufficiently affordable & reliable controller chip is part of the problem.
I also suspect that Apple may not necessarily really want to put a FW800 port on the side of the box when they know that a hardware change (controller chip) is required to boost up the 1600/3200 speeds: Pros who have been working with FW for years will understand this, but not consumers.... however! ...the problem with this logic is that USB2 --> USB3 is going to incur the same customer confusion.
Apple caught flak for changing the supplier (away from Ti) and rightfully so: it might have been cheaper for Apple, but it was an inferior solution which has caused customer dissatisfaction. One strategy to sidestep a criticism of a feature's poor performance is to simply eliminate the feature.
IMO, an "everything wireless" paradigm is coming (where the puck is going to be), but again, we're left in the lurch for legacy sytems support until that technology becomes pragmatically real. Maybe its closer than we think it is, but there's an adoption risk to that as well.
In the meantime, perhaps hitting up Apple's email address to solicit developer-related information about FireWire technologies might be a helpful way to remind Apple's leadership that there's still a lot of consumer interest in FW too; perhaps consider trying: firewire@apple.com.
-hh
