Who says that this will leave Apple high and dry?
In other forums quite long ago it was speculated that the Cell concept would be ideally suited for PowerBooks. Instead of having one power hungry, hot G5, use 4 low-power, low-heat Cell CPUs. Or even dual core Cell CPUs.
The reality is of course more difficult as the Cell CPUs don't have AltiVec and Mac applications generally are not really highly multi-threaded yet. But the point was that OS X is designed for multi CPUs (and/or multi core CPUs. It should be possible for Apple to run OS X on a Cell derivative. Especially if Apple would develop some kind of OS X 'microOS' which could fully load into each of the Cell CPUs, running a complete system on each chip.
I would even go so far as to say that this could be plan B for desktops too, in case 90nm and 65nm processes won't scale CPU clock speeds any more. What if 4GHz is the wall? Cell systems could be a way out.
Because of Apple's affiliation with IBM, it could be much better off in the long run - because of Cell.
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