I have to agree with you on those points. But seeing that overclocking can get us to the ghz, I imagine that Apple isn't too far from releasing official 1ghz power mac G4's.
My beige G3 goes up from 266 to 300, or down to 250mhz, but the bus up to 83mhz (from 66).
I've been experimenting with it lately, and I got Mac OS X to work as low as 166mhz, and honestly, it ran pretty smooth.