The bigger reveal seems to me that Steve then took the Vaio laptop running OS X to Japan (or Hawaii, see below) to meet with Sony. This is well after Apple had killed off their clone business, but it seems they were looking at a possible licensee deal? I can't begin to imagine how different the last 10 years would have been in the tech world if Sony had (finally) licensed Mac OS.

(quora comment mentioning Hawaii meeting: http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets...)