I don't think this has anything to do with this thread, Lt.?
... Back to topic: I'm _very_ content with how this transition is going. If I think back to the older transitions (68K -> PowerPC, classic Mac OS -> Mac OS X), it's certainly been the smoothest yet. In some aspects, it's very similar to the former, the main difference being that when Macs got PPCs, the OS wasn't PPC clean for a long time (AFAIK Mac OS 9.2.2 _still_ isn't completely), whereas the operating system _here_ was quite intel-clean from the beginning in January 2006, when Apple released the first intel Mac.
I agree that the highest end PowerMac G5 probably still is the better machine than the highest end Mac Pro for certain tasks (involving non-universal applications, of course), but if we look at how things were going, it just didn't make sense for Apple to stay PPC. (Besides: Why not just wait things out 'til the software's universal? Your "old" quad G5 certainly still works quite fine?) Where PPC would be now? We'd probably have quad G5s running at 2.7 or 2.8 GHz, whereas the mobile Macs would use something like 1.83 GHz PowerPC G4+ processors, which would be slow as molasses compared to the current crop of mobile Macs.
Apple has done a seriously good job marketing the new machines and the transition in my opinion. They also managed _not_ to have every kiddie illegally installing Tiger on their vanilla PCs. Yes there were hacks that made one or the other build run - and maybe there _will_ be a day where this is going to be easy, but looking back: I expected this to happen very quickly when I first saw a PC boot the developer build(s). Good job as well, Apple.
Rosetta has really wowed me, so far. I remember running applications in Classic. Wow: *THAT* was ugly. It made me switch to a text-only application for all my HTML-coding (which has been a good thing, I've learned quite a bit then), because Golive was slow as molasses. Sure, Rosetta sometimes chokes a little and get slow as well, but nothing like how ugly and slow Classic was! The apps look and feel fine - apart from some performance issues that could only be expected. Very good job: And it keeps getting better. According to tests, Rosetta performance for some applications like Office and Adobe apps have increased up to 25% in the 10.4.8 update that was just released! Wow!
Of course there are still open questions. And we can always say "but PPC was the better architecture" or something like that. It just doesn't matter anymore. I personally wish that Apple would open up some more, add AMD processors to the game and let the _customer_ decide which exact processor(s) should go into his system. I'd also want Apple to be ready with new machines when new processors are available. Or that they'd update the old ones with the new processors as soon as those are available where possible. (We know that you can upgrade the oldest Mac mini with a Core solo processor to a Core 2 Duo processor with not much effort, so this is _not_ a technical issue, but rather Apple's stubbornness and unwillingness to let us have what we want at _our_ timing.)
Sorry for the very long post, but there's even more, of course. Windows. Yeah, we don't need it etc., but even for testing webpages in IE 5.5/6/7 and some other browsers on Windows, Parallels+WinXP is a *MUCH* nicer solution than VirtualPC ever was. Having such things run at native speeds sure is a good thing. Some might say that BootCamp's even better, but I don't really need that - and I'm glad that I don't.
So overall: Yes, this transition has been the best yet - compared to the two older ones I very clearly recall. And I'm not sure how they could have been much better. (Well, Adobe CS 3 would have been nice.)