Given that they've been parallel developing OSX on x86 for years and years now, and seeing how they've handled the transition I think this will probably work pretty well for them.
That emulator they demoed today was pretty amazing really.
Apple had to do this because the PPC just wasn't giving the performance, and as Jobs said today they may be ok but they need to worry about the future.. there is no G5 laptop and the laptop market is huge!
I'm kind of disapointed they didn't go with AMD though. They had that performance per watt graph, and AMD's performance per watt is far better than Intel's (except for the Pentium M, not sure how that compares but that's an impressive processor). But AMD can't even handle the demand they have now let alone adding Apple.
Overall though I see it as a good move for Apple. It means their performance will scale up to match the x86 side of things as time goes by. Hopefully it means easier porting of software from one platform to another meaning more apps for OSX (especially games).
Hopefully it also means that Apple's hardware costs will come down.
That's always what restricts me from getting a Mac.. The high cost, performance issues, I can't build my own system, and the lower catalogue of gaming titles. This move has the potential to address all of those; IF they choose to. The proof will be in the pudding however.
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with talk of running OS-X and Windoze on the same PC will actually spark intrest in some knowing that they won't have to spen a wad of cash to run Apple.
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That won't be the case though, you'll still have to buy Apple hardware to run Apple software. How they accomplish this and if they can restrict people hacking it to run OSX on any computer remains to be seen.
EDIT: One comment I read today that I found funny: "Microsoft has switched to a PowerPC from IBM and Apple has switched to a Pentium from Intel. The world must be ending!"
EDIT2: Oh, and while OSX won't run on a generic PC, maybe Windows will run on an Apple? THAT would be funny.