The point being though, that people would more likely be interested in running MacOS X on a cheap Intel machine, and that's what Apple doesn't want. I'm sure that Apple could care less if people want to run Linux or Windows on Apple hardware. The point is that they will have enough control over the architecture and MacOS X86 to make running MacOS X86 on generic hardware difficult at best. I'm not saying that it can't be done. Darwin already runs on x86, so that's one layer down. The only part that remains is making userland MacOS X86 run on that kernel. I'm sure that it'll make requests that will be hard for standard Wintel machines to deal with. It won't be impossible by any means, but it'll be difficult. Difficult enough that people who are inclined to buy Apple anyway will just buy an Apple x86 machine, and they'll get more people because it'll be cheaper than their current hardware, tho still expensive. The only folks who will hack on it enough to bypass those checks are likely to be geeks who aren't going to buy the Apple hardware anyway, unless it's Dell-cheap. That leaves people who are willing to pay $100 for MacOS X86, but run it unsupported (which doesn't seem like a large demographic) or people who are willing to, uh, use unlicensed copies of MacOS X86. I suppose that is a market that they don't largely have now.

Actually, I'd expect that what Apple would do is bundle the OS with the hardware, like both they and every large PC manufacturer do now so that it'll run/install only on that hardware and then sell unrestricted versions for a lot more. That way they keep the hardware as a gate to the OS, but still appear to be open, but turn that opening into a profit center.

All speculation, obviously.