[Luca]

I don't think Apple loses a lot of switchers because of the lack of choices in video cards. It's pretty far down the list of things that potential Mac buyers run into that discourage them. I think popular opinion and marketing by the PC side are the largest factors, and the high price is also up there.

Anyway, it's just as much up to the video card companies as it is up to Apple to get PC video cards to work in Macs. The reason some cards flash so easily while others are extremely difficult to get working is because the easily flashed cards already have Mac drivers written for them. There are only so many Mac video card drivers. And those drivers are intended to work with the exact hardware that was present in the Mac version of the card. So the Radeon 8500 I got recently should be an easy flash, since it's mechanically identical to the Mac version. However, some other cards are not the same. The ones by third parties can be different enough to not work at all, or to work but with some limitations.

Basically, ATI and nVidia have to start writing Mac drivers for all their video cards. They also have to start supplying ROMs for both PC and Mac on their cards, along with a utility to let you flash them back and forth. Believe it or not, this has actually ALREADY HAPPENED in the past! 3dfx, which made the Voodoo line of cards, stopped selling separate Mac or PC specific cards somewhere around the Voodoo 3 or Voodoo 4. They just sold them by default as PC, but also gave the customer tools to flash the card for use in a Mac. Unfortunately, 3dfx is now kaput, nVidia doesn't even make any retail cards, and ATI seems to think that flashing a video cards is a capital crime (although technically it is illegal since it involves some kind of improper use of ROMs).

I think what you're thinking of is perhaps a way for Apple to modify the OS, or maybe the actual mechanics of their motherboards, to make PC graphics cards actually work natively without any flashing business. I don't know if that is physically possible, though.

EDIT: Wouldn't using standard VGA compliant graphics drivers be really slow? Is that anything like using VGA mode in Windows? If so, then they'd still have to write drivers for basically every PC video card out there, in order to get hardware acceleration.