When you want thoughtful, considered commentary on the Mac, which you do, you can’t go past John Gruber at Daring Fireball. He’s done a nice summary of the whole Apple-Intel thing.
Now that the panic has died down, the general consensus of the Mac-talking people seems to be that it was a bit of a shock, but probably for the best. IBM’s chips are better-designed than Intel’s, abut they aren’t consistently faster in the real world, and they can’t supply as many as fast as Intel.