[jlawer]

I have no doubt ARM will be in mid to high end laptops. I doubt though that the transition will be made emulating x86 apps for most users like it was with rosetta. 75% of Single core benchmarks is likely to become 40% even with a highly efficient emulating layer.

It makes sense to simply make vendors rebuild the app for the new platform then to use an emulating layer.

An emulator may be used for legacy apps, where performance doesn't matter, but apple has never worried too much about legacy in the past, so the mac community won't expect it. All the laptop needs to have is some other killer feature and the community will put enough pressure on the vendors to produce an OSX/arm build of their products.