I'd say crippled is too strong of a word here. Form the libdispatch project main page, linked in the blurb above:
While kernel support provides many performance optimizations on Mac OS X, it is not strictly required for portability to other platforms.
Why parallel programming has to be tied to a kernel change and to a language spec change, when a good library (OpenMP, anyone?, but I'm sure there are others) will suffice...
GCD is not tied to the kernel and a parallel programing library (like OpenMP) won't suffice, because none of the ones that I've seen so far is as easy to use as GCD backed blocks.
Good support for OpenMP or any of the existing shared memory parallel programming libraries would have been much cleaner and portable.
GCD is pretty clean and, since both libdispatch and llvm are open source (and under BSD-like licenses), it and the code written against it are infinitely portable.
Does Linux need selector uniquing if it doesn't use Objective-C?
No it doesn't. Since the average executable on linux is static code linked to dynamic libraries made up of static code, you get your "selector uniquing" at compile time - you don't get a method selector description, instead you get a pre-calculated and already unique address of the method or function.
To me this sounds like an inefficiency in Objective-C that made it less efficient than C++ (the other OO flavour of C) has been improved somewhat.
It is a tradeoff. You get to worry about the performance of shared library selector uniquing, but you get all the benefits of dynamic language and runtime. In practice such inefficiencies matter most in cases where you are very constrained for resources - e.g. on a phone, as hinted in TFA. I doubt in the context of the rest of the performance and efficiency improvements in Snow Leopard and on a reasonably modern computer, the 1/10 of a second or the few megabytes of memory saved matter all that much.
So now you can spend ~$150 for the first time ever in that machine's life and get 10.4 on it.
Actually not even that much, you can buy a copy of Tiger on eBay $50 or less. The grandparent is trolling for shits and giggles, so no point in trying to refute him.
The clones were poorly made and executed the old Mac OS rather poorly. This hurt Apple's overall reputation.
I don't think Apple's biggest problem with the Mac clones of the mid '90s was the tarnished reputation of Mac OS. A much, much bigger problem was something that you also point out in your comment - most people chose cheaper, not better. The prices of the clones did severely undercut the prices of "genuine" Macs and as result Apple's sales practically disappeared. And you are correct - the same would happen today, too.
If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law. -- Roy Santoro