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It’s official. I’ve got egg on my face: Steve Jobs announced today during his keynote at the Worldwide Developers Conference that Apple will begin shipping Macs with Intel inside beginning in 2006. You can watch the keynote address here (the interesting stuff starts at about 21:55).

The market shrugged off the news, with Apple slipping .32 cents during the trading day, and another .08 after hours. But after watching the keynote address, I’m cautiously hopeful about the move. First, if I read the crowd correctly, developers hardly reacted with shock to the announcement and seemed fairly enthusiastic about it. Theo Gray, cofounder of Wolfram Research, creator of Mathematica, gave a humorous demo, and the usual big guns—Microsoft and Adobe—were there to lend their endorsement. According to Gray, it took about two hours to get Mathematica for OS X running on an Intel-based Mac. More importantly, Jobs announced a new technology called Rosetta that lets existing OS X applications run unmodified on Intel-based hardware. Rosetta is a “dynamic binary translator,” translating apps on the fly. It doesn’t require launching an OS in emulation, like Classic. Performance looked fine in the demo.

So, now that last week’s question (”Is it true or not?”) has been answered, the real question, to be debated for the foreseeable future, is: “Is this good or not?” The post-market analyst reaction has been mixed.

And if you’re wondering why Apple is making the switch, here’re two answers: First, there’s the answer Steve gave, which is that Intel processors run cooler (it’s all about the PowerBook, see?). The second answer is speculation, but makes a lot of sense. Leander Kahney writes in “Hollywood Orders: Apple Wed Intel,” that it’s a shotgun wedding. Apple needs the hardware copy protection scheme included in Intel’s new Pentium D chips. If that’s true, expect a lot of exciting rumors over the next year (iMovies Movie Store? Video iPod?).

Another question is “how will this impact sales of current Macs?” I’ve been waiting since last year to buy a PowerBook, holding out for a never-to-be G5 model. Will I wait another year for a PowerBook with Intel inside? I don’t have an urgent need for one, so I’ll wait as long as I can, but yesterday I would have ordered a new G5 PowerBook without hesitation.

Yet another question: “How long will it be before OS X runs on any Intel-based PC?” Someone will figure out a better solution than PearPC. Transitive?

But what I really want to know is this: “Is my liquid cooled dual 2.5 Ghz PowerPC G5 going to become a collector’s item in 2006?”