<<Here we go...hope they get it out stable and as soon as they can.>>
I think this will help them get it out possibly sooner than mid-98. I believe they have much of the microkernal already done and stable (and it's been a while since this was stable). Now they'll just be making the core OS components (which are all nicely compartmentalized because of the nature of a Microkernal-based OS...everything is a component linked to the microkernal). The new system will also facilitate the new updating scheme, because they can focus on particular components of the system for upgrade as they are all independent "chunks"
For instance, the basic way it works is:
Hardware | Microkernal / | \ File System GUI Multiple OS Components (Quicktime/OpenDoc/etc)
Also, it has a good chance of taking us directly to full preemptive multithreaded multitasking system and application-wide. It's probably easier to implement full preemptivity than to implement a partially preemptive, partially cooperative multitasking environment...especially since there are already so many good models of preemptive multitasking out there (Amiga, Unix, BeOS, etc.)
I think this is one decision that will not take long to overcome the possible negative aspects it puts forth. Although it may take developers time to port their programs, depending on how different Apple makes the deep structure in order to optimize for speed, those programs will blow anything else out of the water. In the graphics and publishing areas, Apple already has a commanding lead in pure application speed because of the subsystems they use. Now, when you finally take away the HUGE bottleneck in speed the current OS has, the Mac will be unbeatably fast at these tasks, and much much more useful, to boot.
