Now that Intel's Core Duo has finally been launched, Apple could go ahead with their PowerPC to x86 transition, but there's another problem. A very smart man at Intel once told me that you should never launch a new microarchitecture alongside a new manufacturing process, with so many variables things are bound to go wrong making delays inevitable. With the Core Duo, Intel not only introduced a reasonably sized change in microarchitecture, they also made the shift to 65nm on this semi-new architecture. The end result seems to be that availability of Core Duo processors and chipsets just isn't all that great..You can check it out over here.
Apple iMac G5 vs iMac Core Duo

Anand from AnandTech compared the old iMac G5 with the new Intel-based iMac Core Duo: