I'm glad someone made this comment, although I confess I stopped reading the whole thread after the comment count went above 700 or so, so for all I know there is another like it in the dogpile here.

There is something about this topic that really gets the comments going, and I wonder what it is.

It's not just Apple vs. Microsoft. It is also Apple vs. what Apple should have done, or Microsoft vs. what its competitors are doing.

I propose that a simple A vs. B discussion isn't enough to provoke all this. Today's Apple announcement is being taken as a kind of indirect referendum on the future of nerd-friendly high-end computing hardware as a whole. As you point out, the waning significance of this question (with the rise of phones and tablets) has caused a lot of anxiety out there!