Porting Software to Power (
www.power.org)
I've been reading about Transitive's Quicktransit product, and it looks to be very promising. IBM will be shipping Quicktransit on their p5 and OpenPower servers starting at the end of this year or early 2007, and you are able to run such things as 3D applications with around an 80% drop in speed (which isn't bad if you have a very powerful power-based system). With a product like what this may turn out to be, many people's main reason for not going with a power-based computer (need for x86 applications) would be a non-issue.
Quicktransit for x86->Power isn't out just yet, but it sounds like it will be available soon after the OSW arrives. If this "hardware virtualization" works as they are saying it will, then combined with the release of Genesi's OSW things could start changing for the better.