Mac on Intel - First-hand report

Xlr8YourMac has up one of the first hands-on reports with an Intel-based Apple Macintosh. No, it is not a production unit that any of us is going to be able to buy. It is one of the units made up for Apple Developers, so they can begin working on converting their code for the eventual launch to the mainstream. XLR8 doesn't have a way to directly link to the story, so I'll paste more than usual here as a blockquote.

First, the thing is fast. Native apps readily beat a single 2.7 G5, and sometimes beat duals. Really.
(I asked about real-world apps - if any were already available in native code-Mike)
All the iLife apps other than iTunes, plus all the other apps that come with the OS are already universal binaries....
They are using a Pentium 4 660. This is a 3.6 GHz chip. It supports 64 bit extensions, but Apple does not support that *yet*. The 660 is a single core processor. However, the engineers said that this chip would not be used in a shipping product and that we need to look at Intel's roadmap for that time to see what Apple will ship...They run Windows fine. All the chipset is standard Intel stuff, so you can download drivers and run XP on the box.
Rosetta is amazing... The tests I've run, both app tests and benchmarks, peg it at between a dual 800 MHz G4 and and a dual 2 G5 depending on what you are doing.
(I mentioned to him the limitations of Rosetta (posted below)-Mike)
It's true Rosetta does not support Altivec, but most apps run on a G3, right? Rosetta tells PPC apps that it is a G3. Apps should fall back to their G3 code tree. Everyone I tested did.
The UI tests in Xbench exceed a dual 2.7 by a large margin. (other specific tests are much lower than a G5 per Xbench site results.-Mike)

Rosetta is the code that Apple bought from Transmeta that allows a Pentium 4 to act like a PowerPC in order to run existing Mac code. It does appear that every time Apple makes their customers do a conversion (680X0 to PowerPC, MacOS 9 to MacOS X) they make it easier on us users.

But I still can't get over the choice of Intel. It feels like a chicken choosing a fox as their henhouse guard.