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Snow Leopard will not run on PPC (at least that is my understanding).

I'm confused, I thought one of the complaints about Vista was the fact that it would not run on older hardware.

Isn't that pretty much what I said? Vista was the whipping boy MS needed to make a break with much of the legacy equipment. Still, Win 7 will run on many computers that Vista wouldn't-couldn't because it has a smaller footprint(one guy on the Win 7 forums has it running on a laptop with only 500MB of memory and an old x86 cpu).

In most cases the failure has more to do with the lack of suitable drivers for that legacy equipment. Many vid cards would be capable of running the software if their manufacturers would provide updated drivers. AMD/ATI for example is unlikely to provide video drivers for older video cards (like the X series) for the newer operating systems (I have a set of crossfired Radeon X1650's in one of my older computers that are fully capable of running Win 7-separately or jointly-but the driver support is not there).

Most legacy problems can be attributed to driver problems. It's understandable; why continue to support a 5 year old card when you can force people to buy a newer one?

It is that broad flexibility and wide selection of suitable hardware that allows Windows to so dominate the market. Apple marginalized itself when it chose to remain a closed system (you must buy your computer from Apple) though that has changed, with questionable legality, with the advent of "hackintosh" computers.

Snow Leopard won’t run on PPC which is what I said as well. But what I was saying about Vista was not about driver issues but the real power of the computer wasn’t enough for it. Even several computers with “Vista Ready” stickers couldn’t run it well. On the other hand when I had a PPC and upgraded from Tiger to Leopard, which was around the same time Vista came out, my old computer ran better. I fully expect that even the oldest Intel Macs will run faster with Snow Leopard.

And as you said, how long do you support legacy hardware before you just require an upgrade? Like many people sticking with XP (albeit for different reasons) a PPC running Leopard will run as long as you want it too. I don’t know how long they will continue issuing security updates or how long software makers will support it, but if someone is happy with their setup now it will last as long as the computer does.