Mac OS X 10.7 Lion - the death knell of the Mac as we know it

Just like third-party native apps, "multitasking", notifications, "the large screen iphone form-factor", etc, etc ad nauseum. Experience tells us: when Jobs says "we won't be doing that," it often means: "we're actively researching a way to do exactly that."

Additionally, there's a lot of momentum headed in this direction, already: recent Windows 8 demos show a heavily touch-influenced design (almost to the point of perhaps implying that touchscreens will be required, but who knows.. microsoft tends to scale back their ambitions when it comes to actual releases). Also, GNOME 3's UX centerpiece (gnome-shell) is, while not-at-all there yet, heavily built around the design concept of integrating touchscreen capabilities into the core workflow. Ditto for Ubuntu's Unity, which has already integrated gestures on touchscreen capable interfaces/trackpads (something they've been chasing down since, oh, 10.04).

With the above in mind, the tl;dr from this article (OSX goes mandatory touchscreen at some point in the future) is not that crazy to imagine.