It's a huge departure. It's a big deal. But it's tied to their business model: Apple is a hardware company.
It's all very complicated, which is just crazy. Unless you're a music lover, maybe you don't bother with it. It's hard to find your way around.
They have a great hardware product, but they've been shut off from businesses and consumers who want to run PC programs, and now they have the software that will allow that.
Apple is not looking at the chip for differentiation. It's counting on its hardware and software for that. If anything, it's taking the line of thinking that the chip inside makes little difference to the quality of the computing experience.
Apple is a hardware company - they build software to sell the hardware. The question really is, Why not support the installation of Windows on their computers?
Microsoft has changed the way information is stored, so that any application can use WinFS. It essentially turns the hard drive into a database. That makes it much easier to find and back up data.