Whoever moderated this "flame bait" needs their ass kicked. That was the funniest thing I've read all week.

Actually, with every announcement you've been demonstrated to be wrong. Mac OS X isn't going anywhere. Apple has quite clearly been working very hard to bring some of the best ideas from iOS to the Mac OS X platform. They also introduced a nascent third platform, iCloud. If there was news of a platform's demise to be read between the lines at the WWDC 2011 keynote yesterday, it's more likely to be the demise of Windows as a consumer OS.

Since Apple currently offers you the choice of a tablet starting at $499 and laptops starting at $1199 (or something like that) and since the choice is already between a tablet iOS device with a subset of functionality, vs. a laptop or iMac with greater "professional" level functionality, then all you've done here is out yourself as a troll, or waste electrons on the internet. Which is it?

If that scenario pans out (and the recent HP blathering about why they are not interested in Thunderbolt provides some evidence that it might) then you'll see Apple's share of the consumer market growing even faster over the next couple years, when Mac users are loading their iPad with movies to take on the plane in about 90 seconds, and HP users are spending a non trivial part of an hour to do the same.

FireWire was the replacement for SCSI, for connecting fast external drives to a Mac. (Mac computers at one time were all SCSI, internal and external connectors.) There's more about the relationship, at FireWire Wikipedia. My (fuzzy) recollection is that, at one time, one could even get adapter cables to allow FireWire ports on a Mac to connect a SCSI hard drive.

Of course, my next migration will be via Thunderbolt.

FireWire isn't dead, yet. I use it to migrate from one Mac to another about once a year, and to connect hard drives. USB is sorta like gruel. You could eat it. But I've got whole modern cuisines, why would I give that up?

You haven't been paying attention. The "tech geeks" in the families of "non-tech savvy consumers" have been telling them for a few years now, "sell it on eBay and buy a Mac." Thunderbolt will do fine, even if only Mac users get to connect their iPad 3 or iPhone 5 to it and get Thunderbolt 10 Gbps transfer speeds. They won't care what all y'all are doing, and won't be interested in how long it takes you to sync your iPad. "You know how long it takes? Mine is so quick, I never thought about it."

The decline of a commonly agreed objective reality (based on facts and logical reasoning) in United States at least, appears to be concurrent with the rising popularity of home schooling in the past 25 or 30 years. It's not clear that government is the problem. Certainly it doesn't appear to be the only problem.