[gillianseed]

>Apple would have little to no interest in llvm if the plan wasn't to completely replace gcc from the beginning.

Sure, I have no doubt that Apple's sponsoring/stewardship of llvm is entirely fueled by them wanting a full toolchain which they can incorporate into their proprietary solutions and Clang is obviously a result of that (it's functionality reflects exactly what Apple want, C, C++ and ObjC support).

That said llvm was already 5 years into the making when Apple came and hired Chris Lattner (one of the original creators of llvm) so they have no say on the initial aim of the project which again was to be a backend replacement for gcc.