When Apple announced Intel support, I thought for sure this was a technical move so that they could eventually become an OS and software company, in additional to a computer/electronics company. I was expecting them, within a year, to have a standalone version of OSX compatible with most hardware configurations.
They stand to make a killing if they officially ship an OS which supports non-Apple hardware. Hell, if I were any hardware vendor, I'd gladly work with them to be one of the first official compatible hardware vendors. Even if there were only a handful of Apple-supported hardware components, they'd made a killing once people start building and selling Apple computers themselves.
By the way, whatever happened to that (non-Apple) business that was building computers with OSX on it?