Ben Hermans still staunchly against x86

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They may well have said it. It doesn't make it true however. The one and only thing that killed BeOS, was Microsoft putting pressure on OEMs to block the OS being sold.

Glad someone agrees with me on that.

The reason they dumped PPC was because it was hugely expensive to develop (in terms of hardware development) and not particularly fast even when done right...

AFAIK the reason they dumped PPC was they had no machines to develop for.  They had been targeting Mac clones but as soon as they were cancelled they had no choice but to switch to x86.

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From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z196_CPU

IBM has CISC z/Architecture CPU with a new superscalar, out-of-order pipeline with 5.2Ghz speeds. Like any modern X86, this IBM Z-Arch CISC CPU includes CISC-to-RISC hybrid design.
Z196 was announced on July 22, 2010.

Interesting, the previous Z11 was a pure CISC chip, this is just mostly CISC.

It can only be a matter of time before it gets merged with POWER though.

It looks like IBM is going to fight Intel/AMD X86-64 with it's own 1970s 64bit CISC ISA CPU.

No, the Z series is for mainframes only. It's exotic and highly expensive hardware and they make vast sums of money from it.

My point, the RISC migration adventure was a waste of time.

But you're saying the opposite - everyone has gone RISC internally.
Anyway, in the embedded market RISC is king and it's much, much bigger than desktop.