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The author of the article has the strange idea that Apple's x86 strategy would be to design, manufacture and sell x86 hardware. Were that the case, the objections raised to that strategy in the article would be quite valid.

But of course, that is not Apple's only way to play the x86 game, nor is there any chance they would do anything like that in the near future. What Apple should do, and very well may do, is to port OSX to the x86, and sell it as an alternative to Windows/Linux. In other words, in the x86 world, they would be a software vendor only. They would continue to sell PowerPC-based hardware.

With OSX available for x86 hardware, software vendors with OSX-based products would potentially have a far larger market: there are two orders of magnitude more x86 machines than there are Macintoshes. Apple would have an additional source of revenue: those who prefer, for whatever reason, to use x86 hardware. Just 1% of that market would be extremely significant both to Apple, and to software vendors with OSX-based products.

The major risk would be that a significant percentage of those who would have bought Apple's PowerPC-based hardware might decide instead to buy x86 hardware (on which they run OSX). This is a risk because Apple would make less profit per unit on OSX for x86 than per a Macintosh/OSX bundle. This risk only matters if one assumes that Apple's customer count wouldn't change much as the customer base switches from Macintosh hardware to x86 hardware. But it doesn't seem likely that that would be what would happen.

OSX for x86 would not be a very popular product, even among Mac fanatics, unless and until significant software titles became available. And that wouldn't happen unless software vendors had faith in the viability of the market for OSX software on x86 hardware. So the mere fact that you could buy a CD that would install OSX on your x86 machine would not, by itself, have all that much effect on Apple's sales.

However, if there were sufficient x86/OSX software available so that those who would have bought a Mac start deciding to buy x86 hardware instead, then we're in a different world entirely. In that world, it wouldn't just be high-probablility Mac customers who would be buying OSX-x86. Far from it. There would be at least as many former Windows/Linux users also buying OSX-x86--probably more than enough to offset the per-unit profit differential between Mac customers and OSX-x86 customers.