Well, I think its more like f. ex. Itix quite repeatedly said: It's a thing of motivation/situation when it's due. If the ppc Mac field is covered and the team feels like continuing the work, well, what's to do then? Looking for a new target of course.
I don't see this as some vague comment from the past. I see this as a pronounced commitment, a current mission statement. The day Itix spoke of (never saw that comment though, but I'll take your word for it) has kind of come, and a decision is made and is now communicated. This wasn't the case before. They are about to support the Powerbook PPC laptop. Comments I have seen rather recently makes me believe they won't really go after the G5, but we'll see about that. Anyway, besides the added HW support, they obviously have a list of things they want to add to MorphOS during the upcoming series of 3.x releases during the coming few years. And it's a very nice, ambitious and impressive list, and I'm sure they'll come up with even more stuff along the road!
After that (or maybe even in parallel, or maybe someone already begun some time ago) they'll start working on the 64-bit part, etc, etc and prepare the migration to a new architecture.
If in a few years powerful and suited ppc hardware pops out of the nowhere
Now *that* is a serious pipe dream, hehe! :p
And more important to judge this kind of announcement from a user's POV: Don't fall for pipedreams, use what's available today. Or even shorter: "Live every day as if it were your last day"
Of course, and nobody said otherwise. The MorphOS 3.x branch will be a killer. Everything won't come in the 3.
0 release, it's obvious that they have much planned for upcoming releases as well. So like I said earlier, for the immediate future there will be MorphOS 3.0. For a little more intermediate future, there will be 3.1, 3.2, ..., ..., etc. And in a longer term future (might not actually be that far away in an "Amiga time perspective", we'll see), there will be an "Apple leap" to MorphOS 4.0 (or whatever) on x64 and/or ARM, with 64-bit support, maybe SMP, MP etc in a way that wasn't possible before. A clear and communicated road map for the short-, mid-, and long-term future, for the first time (as far as I remember)! This made at least me look at MorphOS's future with a much more positive eyes!