I think you're preaching to the choir here on killing x86. The x86 ops get translated to RISC ops anyway. What I wonder is why they haven't attempted to release two versions: an x86 version, and a stripped down RISC version without the x86 decoder. Obviously this would be monumental task at all levels of the design, but it would seem they could get similar performance on the RISC version without as much effort as needed for the x86 version since that overhead is removed. I would guess(and hope) that most of their design effort goes into optimizing the design in the RISC world after the instructions are translated anyway. This will never happen though because windows == x86 only. Being able to compile most of the needed applications from source gives hardware designers the freedom to shed legacy interfaces every 5 years instead of every 30. It would be a glorious future if hardware producers started realizing that open source software == greater hardware design flexibility == better performance/cost. Hopefully this is already happening with the shift from x86 to ARM on netbooks.

Call me ignorant or incompetent, but 'sudo su' gets the job done...