I'm not sure I'd characterize the switch to Intel as an "utter freakout" -- my impression is that the doubters quieted down fairly fast once they got a look at the demos of the compatibility layer and the relative ease of cross-compiling. And while the switch to Intel now looks like a no-brainer, hindsight is always 20-20. That said, I'll agree -- to the extent that people freaked out about the Intel transition, it might be fair to call it an example of "religious mania".

But complaints about Firewire aren't about religion. Firewire and USB 2.0 are only "interchangeable" if you don't already own thousands of dollars' worth of Firewire-only peripherals. Which quite a few people do.

Yes, there are probably converters out there somewhere, or there will be. But will they affect latency? Will they affect driver stability? The owners of $1200 audio interfaces worry about such things. A lot.

Of course, this is not yet the end of the world. As the article points out, Apple still offers Firewire on the MacBook Pro. Moreover, they are still selling machines like my white Macbook, with Firewire, for less money than the new Macbooks. So it's not as if Firewire is being phased out tomorrow. But I don't blame customers for pushing back. If people can convince Apple to keep Firewire around for an additional year, that's one more year that I don't have to spend several hundred bucks to replace my Firewire-based audio interface and hard drive enclosures.