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It's funny, when you wrote "Engadget is reporting that the new Mac will only run Vista", I thought to myself, what about OSX?!
Then I thought about it. You mean that it won't run any Microsoft OS older than Vista.
Made me do a double-take.
Very poor...
Here's one response from a guy who has done a lot of homework on this issue:
++++++++++++++
I read on your blog that you're trying to find out whether the new Macs will boot Windows. I've spent a fair bit of time looking into this and talking with Steve Makofsky over in Windows Incubation (another Mac enthusiast) about it. Here's what I've learned:
As Engadget reported, Windows XP won't boot; however, they omitted some details. Apparently Apple has chosen not to implement CMS, which would enable legacy operating systems to boot. As their article states, 32-bit Windows XP doesn't support EFI. You can read more about EFI and CMS at the following sites:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/f...
http://www.intel.com/technology/framework/overv...
Even if Windows Vista does implement EFI, or if some inspired hacker comes up with a way to add CMS to Apple's firmware, there's still the problem that the new MacBooks come with some Apple-specific hardware such as the keyboard backlight, the one-button trackpad, and the embedded iSight camera. Until Apple implements Windows drivers for their hardware, these won't work. (It's possible that other hardware, such as the fans, battery, ExpressCard/34, and network controller are part of a standard Intel chipset that would already have drivers, at least in Vista. Or they might also require new drivers. Without more details from Apple about the hardware, we can't know.)
Microsoft's MacBU is working on an updated Virtual PC for the Intel Macs. No date promised yet though. See http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/200...
Gates originally offered partnersip to Jobs (I forgot the details, but it was something to do with Gates asking Jobs to make the GUI a multi-platform OS (ironically the term 'open' meant something different at the time) and thus Apple would essentially become a software business together with Microsoft (Gates tried to convince Jobs that hardware would become commodified) but Jobs felt that Gates was wrong and that "staying hardware" would make Apple big and Microsoft small.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10794396/from/RS.3/
For hardware, the Mac stuff, though in some ways proprietary still has "open" standards with firewire. The iSight, to my understanding, is a more standard firewire device.
The mouse should be similar in that aspect. The keyboard, well, that's questionable, but I'd imagine mostly standard, minus the backlighting. However, that could probably be ignored as an unknown device. Depends on how they've implemented it.
Altogether, Vista should run on one of these fine. Some things probably won't work - i.e. the backlight, but most things should work fine - the display, network (broadcom if I remember correctly... it's a public chipset though), wireless cards, etc. etc.
Additionally, on Virtual PC, VMware is working on a version of their software for OS X - so that's always an option. Additionally, Xen virtualization and other technologies should allow the option of running windows regardless.
What I want to know, is whether it will run BeOS and VMWare.
If you want to run Vista, get a Dell or something equally boring.