Very interesting post. I had no idea that apple had a sales strategy like that - puzzling.
Have you found a solution to your project/visio compatibility? I got Omni Outliner and Omni Graffle with my powermac g5 and I can warmly recommend the latter (haven't really tried outliner yet). I just love Graffle and use it at least four days a week.
At the omni group website I found that Omni Graffle Pro supports import/export to and from the visio format. I don't know if the omni group has some application supporting the ms project format, but its very likely.
Ref:
http://www.omnigroup.com