There undoubtedly are still a lot more XP users than there are Tiger users. Not sure what your point is. Ed Bott was just stating PowerPC (or any non-Intel (proprietary)) users were going to be orphaned needing to buy a new Mac. Also stating the cost from Tiger to Snow Leopard isn't a great deal.
$169 isn't that bad especially in essence skipping a generation of an OS in between. My only gripe is the misleading nature of Apple parading this $29 figure and simultaneously burying the $169 cost.
My point is there are a lot more people likely skipping Vista and going to Windows 7 from XP than there are going to be people who will have to skip Leopard. Most have likely already upgraded. I wasn’t comparing pure numbers, but percentage of users of the platform.
It isn’t all that misleading. They have always said $29 to upgrade from Leopard. It has never been stated that it is the same from Tiger.
At some point Apple was going to have to drop PPC support. Now seems like as good a time as any.