[mdnky]

When they announced the switch Apple clearly said they would limit Mac OS X from booting on non-Mac hardware. They said nothing about limiting other OSes from booting on Mac hardware, in fact one high level spokesman was quoted as saying booting Windows would be possible.

You would probably need to partition the hard-drive (one for Mac OS X, one Windows [ntfs]) and install some kind of boot-loader, but it should work.

I'd wager we might see a version of WINE ported to Mac OS X (Intel only), since the only thing holding it back before was the chip architecture difference. Microsoft might also replace VPC with an app that acts similar to WINE.

Easy way to tell...make a DOS or Windows boot CD (or grab a bootable Windows CD you may have lying around, or a Linux Live CD [Knoppix, Ubantu] for x86) and bring it to the Apple Store when they get an Intel-based Mac in. If you can boot off the CD (to a DOS prompt/windows setup/Linux desktop), then it'll work. I'd be willing to bet it will work fine, as long as there aren't any driver issues.