Macs, PCs, and AmigaOnes all share similar commodity components; graphics cards, sound chips, network chipsets, etc. As has been argued time and again, companies like NVidia, ATI, Creative Labs are the "Amigas" of current industry (doing the expensive "custom chip design" work); if you squint the right way, they're just a heck of a lot better at marketing their technology than Amiga or Commodore ever were, ensuring their designs land in just about every machine on the planet.
Apple does custom work when it has to, but only when it can't get by otherwise. What it wants is to sell you a "closed box" with their OS and not tell you much about it. (If you knew your RAM, Airport card, or Bluetooth dongle was just a commodity part from someone like
these guys, would you be so eager to pay a premium?)
"PowerPC" wasn't intended to be limited to the Apple platform, but Apple convinced every PowerPC maker to get into the "Mac clone" business in the '90s, promising their OS would always be licensable. Then they dove close to bankruptcy, switched CEOs, and reneged on the contracts, hosing all those third parties - Power Computing, UMAX, Pios - who didn't have plan Bs, and leaving the PowerPC consortium - Motorola and IBM - chagrined in the process.
Today, Linux is popular and something Apple can't take away (and if SCO takes it away against all logic, the BSD family of free *NIX is ready to take its place), so IBM is ready to start ramping those "G5s." Motorola is spinning off its processor division, so those guys are going to have to start living on their own merits as well.
In contrast to Apple, Eyetech and Genesi are at least trying to be "open." They'll tell you who makes their components (Mai or Marvell, Via, and ATI), and at least make best-efforts to help third parties get OSes on the hardware. (And, as a more noticable convenience, support commodity hardware, even when it's *not* convenient. See the hoops jumped through to make x86-BIOS'd graphics cards work, saving us from a lifetime of expensive "Mac Edition" hardware.)
"Scene" rivalries obfuscate it, but both companies want to afford every paying customer the same degree of support. The arguments (OS4 on Pegasos, MOS on AmigaOne) occur because the OS guys see no benefit in buying competing hardware just to "give sales away" to it, not because anyone's playing Apple levels of coy with necessary specs. :-)
The price/performance isn't perfect right now; these are startups, and PowerPC's just getting on its feet again. If you can respect the goals - getting that price/performance down somewhere reasonable, enjoying PowerPC's "cleanliness" in comparison to the x86 legacy, and higher efficiency in power consumption and heat thrown off - then maybe it's worth supporting; if you want 4 or MorphOS, then obviously you'll need the hardware anyway; if you can't see the point of either, then sure, stick with the Mac or "Wintel" until you find a reason to change your mind.
