I think I'll be able to hold off on moving to an Intel Mac almost indefinitely (my AMD tower is incredibly fast at home and my iBook G4 does just fine with Mac apps so far -- more interested in a cheap Origami device right now, actually), but this report from Macworld is incredibly encouraging.

As you can see, the mini was remarkably quicker than both the PowerPC Macs, and by a wide margin. This new Universal Finder, finally, feels incredibly fast and responsive. There's only one downside to all this speed: when I switch back to the G5 now, I'm astounded by how slow the Finder feels!

That a mini -- a dual core, sure, but a consumer computer -- runs the OS, so to speak, more quickly than your old-style professional model really is pretty impressive. I wonder if OS X on Intel has been getting more performance tuning than the PPC side recently. Makes sense if your product line is headed toward Intel (and, obviously, with Apple it is); I'm guessing Intel first, PPC second.

It's an awkward time to be a Mac-using professional who can't quite yet leave the dual G5 set up for Photoshop, but the mini performance seems to indicate a very good future for OS X.