[rwmj]

The high-end POWER 7/8 hardware has incredible single core performance, beating the pants off Xeon. It uses huge amounts of power to do that, so it's not appropriate for all roles. Low end POWER is pretty niche. Freescale uses the architecture for telecoms applications.

In general Linux upstream these days "just works" on ppc64 & ppc64le. There's RHEL for POWER already, and IBM have loaned hardware to the CentOS project so we'll get CentOS on POWER pretty soon.

The licensing of (Open-)POWER is more open than x86 (but not as open as stuff like RISC-V), and there are several second sources for chips, in situations where that matters.