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It's conceivable that they could do something wild with proprietary hardware, but I doubt they would, and I don't think they should. I think Apple will be using more or less standard PC motherboards (like in the development kits), and that makes sense. The dev kits are using Intel's TPM (Trusted Platform Module — a name that makes me gag just typing it) to limit what hardware it can run on, and this has already been hacked to allow OS X to run on any ol' PC.
There's no saying Apple won't change the system they use to limit hardware compatibility. That's quite likely, even. But whatever they do, really, it's only a matter of time before it's hacked to run natively on general PCs, or at the very least run in a near-full-speed "virtual machine" à la Virtual PC for Windows. Apple can make it hard, but realistically, they can't make it impossible.
That said, whatever Apple does will be enough to keep 99+% of the PC using world from running OS X on non-Apple hardware, and that's what really matters. Apple needs to keep selling their own hardware. I don't really like that attitude (since it is, after all, a completely artificial limitation), but hey, that's the truth of the matter.
They could, however, start a little cat-and-mouse game with the hackers. Imagine every little security update somehow breaking compatibility with all the hacks. It would make it very impractical to bother running OS X on non-Apple machines. I imagine this kind of thing will happen even without Apple specifically trying to do it. (Actually, this already happens on the Mac side with people installing OS X on older, unsupported Apple hardware, like pre-G3 Macs with processor upgrades. You can do it using something like XPostFacto, but it's rarely easy, and every new version of OS X makes it harder and harder.)
So, there's my answer. If you don't mind my asking, why exactly do you feel this is important one way or another? Just wondering.
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