Apple has plenty of experience emulating old operating systems to maintain compatibility, whether it was 680X0 emulation on early PowerPC machines, System 9 or Classic emulation under OS X, or even today's Rosetta on-the-fly conversion of PowerPC apps to run on MacIntel boxes.

Trying to save the company, Steve got Bill Gates to invest $150 million in Apple and promise to keep Mac Office going for a few more years in exchange for a five-year patent cross-licensing agreement ... But I'm told that the exchange wasn't totally one-way, that Apple, in turn, got some legal right to the Windows API.

I'm told Apple has long had this running in the Cupertino lab -- Intel Macs running OS X while mixing Apple and XP applications. This is not a guess or a rumor, this something that has been demonstrated and observed by people who have since reported to me.