Agree, a lot of people waiting for the new iMacs. I can wait a few more months, as I’ve been wanting to upgrade for a couple years now. My wife is complaining that Lion slowed down our old MacBook compared to Snow Leopard, even with an SSD. The new Mountain Lion won’t work on it (I misspoke calling it Snow Lion). I’ve got an even older iMac than my MacBook. I do most stuff on my iPads so no longer need the portability of the MacBook. I suspect a lot of others will shift to iMacs for non-iPad stuff. Apple will be selling a lot of iMacs just for that reason alone.
Yup, the iPad has liberated the must-be-mobile use from the big-and-powerful use. I’d gone the laptop route, but laptops are a compromise: portability sacrificing power/capacity, but at the same time sacrificing portability for power/capacity. Tablet + desktop = superportable always-there always-connected flexibility + superpowerful multi-core massive/multi-monitor multi-gigabyte multi-terabyte let’s-challenge-Moore’s-law capability. Throw in cloud storage and remote desktop, and the desktop market will take off again thanks to tablets.
I’ll keep waiting, ever more grudgingly, for the new >=27” iMac. In the meantime, my “home computer” (a now-woefully-underpowered ultraportable with a dead battery and dead fan) serves little more purpose than the obligatory iTunes base.