Well, the thing is, that you can run PPC compiles of most major Linux distributions on it. Granted, it's still not hitting a very large audience, but larger than just Mac users. I'm not a particularily big fan of Apple for being Apple, but I have to commend them on a job well done here.
Dual 2 GHz, 64-bit processors, each on a 1 GHz FSB, wow. Up to 8 GB of 400 MHz 128-bit DDR SDRAM, wow. sATA, PCI-X, FireWire 800 and 400, USB 2.0, optical audio in/out, wow. Plus, they're using AGP 8X (I'm not gonna wow for that), which means the upcoming major card releases will be available to the G5 users as well. In my opinion, the thing that Apple really has going for them here is huge data busses all around. Yeah, there are other impressive things about 215 simultaneous instructions rather than 16, and things like that, but the data bus is what was really allowing Apple to out-perform the dual Xeon 3.06 GHz system on the selected tests in the keynote.
Plus, you talked about the steep price. It's not really all that expensive, for the performance its demonstrated. It'll be another thing to see what the x86 technology, performance, and price is like in August, but if Apple was shipping right now, I'd say they would have one of the best choices for hardware on the market (except for the processor architecture taking away from its potential user base).
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