Apple won't port OS X to an x86 based machine for several reasons:

1) Apple is the most profitable computer company in the world. Somehow apple has taken the process of building cool looking machines, with awesome spec sheets, and real world performance. and dropped the price... and not just because components cost less...

2) Mac OS X is uniquely grounded with the PowerPC G3 and G4 processors. Moreso the G4 than the G3, as you'll note with performance. The velocity engine on the G4 chips does wonders to the speed of the Aqua user interface, allowing it to run at some points almost 6 times the speed of an equivelant G3 based machine.

3) Apple is out to change the world. CISC (Core Instruction Set Computing) based processors have been manufactured for almost 30 years now. That's freakin old. RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) has only been around since the mid nineties, which gives Apple lots of legroom as the largest purchaser of PPC based chips. Also the PowerPC chips were designed from the bottom up knowing they were to be used in systems which would be sporting a graphical user interface. This gives another unique prospective since CISC based chips are still founded on the same pricipals of calculation they were 30 years ago.

4) Apple has always been an 'in house' company. While they've been shying away from that recently, it hasn't met with much enthusiasm from most 'in the know' Mac users, who all realize that Apple has lost some control over the quality of the product hardware wise in the past year. Apple is very enthusiastic about the open source Darwin base of OS X, and is happy that it runs on x86 based machines... however, OS X will not be ported because they simply couldn't justify writing the OS to work on that many different types of machines. Apple has been able to keep their OS more stable and ahead of its time for years by integrating the OS with the hardware that they create. Some see this as a weakness, but I see it as a strong suit, here's why:

{
Since Apple makes more innovative machines, they also make really creative and innovative software. They weren't the first to bring DVD-R to the desktop, but they wanted to wait to give consumers the ability to also burn CD's with the same drive, as well as give them a software package that could help them to easily put together an impressive DVD in just a few minutes. The same was with iTunes. While Apple admittedly was not the first company to bring CD burning to everyone, they brought the easiest way to burn CD's to anyone with a Mac. iTunes is fabulous (if you haven't tried it out yet stop by an AppleStore, or other retailer with a Mac), it really does simplify things a great deal. Data CD burning is built into the OS, so all the user has to do is insert a blank disc and the Os will prompt the user to give the disc a name, from there it's just ike moving files inbetween folders (literally).

Keeping the hardware controlled allows Apple the unique opportunity to make sure that the OS and the software work seamlessly. It also helps developers. Developers don't want to have to make sure their stuff works with this card and that, or this software or that external option... they just want it to work... Apple keeps this simple by providing an OS which is straight forward, and easy to develop for, as well as Hardware which is streamlined and only comes in certain configurations. While users can Upgrade the G4 PowerMac's very easily with new cards and such the likelihood of having the OS, or a software program spontaneously combust is much lower on a Mac. Keeping it this way allows Apple to keep that sort of happy setting within the Macintosh community, and they're not letting go of it anytime soon.
}

DigitalVolume
The Way It Should Be.