It's not fair to disable a machine that works 100% when people out there are so broke. No piracy is involved. Only one line in a file. If what I posted is wrong, I will just take off as I feel this is robbery to make poor people buy a new Mac every 2 years to run the new features and probably iCloud that will be changed and not run on older macs.
This does give the unfortunate appearance of profiteering on the part of Apple; however, I am - for now - going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it
is a performance issue (not that limiting people's options because they want to maintain the image of Macs never running slow is entirely fair itself; as you say, Windows 7 will work in some way on anything you care to install it on, no matter how poorly it may actually run on really old hardware).
I think the real acid test for Apple's motivations will, ironically, be the release of Windows 8. That OS will - in principle - be able to run on any Intel Mac, just like Windows 7 can; if Apple restricts the Windows 8 Bootcamp drivers to only working on newer Macs we'll know that something malicious is afoot, but I don't actually see that happening.
I think the most important thing to bear in mind is that Apple are never going to send a kill signal to shut-down the older versions of OS X (if they did the board of directors would be immediately arrested for gross misconduct and the company would be in forced receivership within a matter of hours!), I doubt they could legally stop iCloud working on older Macs (or older PCs that it currently works on) either, as that would basically amount to holding people's own data to ransom.
The bottom line is: If your machine can't run anything post-Lion, run Lion; if you need PowerPC apps, run Snow Leopard; if you need the functions of Lion
and PowerPC apps either dual-boot on two separate HDDs or run Snow Leopard in a VM.
While, yes, the support will drop-off as time goes-on, 10.6 & 10.7 will be strong, stable, secure OSs for a long while yet. Look at the longevity of Windows XP, an OS now officially classed as "legacy software" (indeed, the local library service I used to work for
still runs all their PCs on Windows 2000 an officially unsupported OS)!
By the time Snow Leopard and Lion become too outdated to keep-on using most of the Macs they're still installed on will be old enough themselves to make it a worthwhile investment replacing them, and enough new x86 Mac software should have been developed to completely replace the catalogue of PPC software lost with the removal of Rosetta.
