I just bought me a MacBook Pro. I used to have a PowerBook G4, but I was suckered in to the MBP due to it's ability to run Windows at native or near-native speeds.

In any case, I spend most of the day futzing around with it. I used the Migration Assistant to transfer all of my stuff from the G4 to the MBP, which worked remarkably well. Some preference panes didn't work, my copies of Snapz Pro 2 and NeoOffice/J ceased functioning, but otherwise it looks and works just like the old machine did, except faster. In the cases that it's not faster, it's because PPC emulation is going on. Rosetta is invisible, and it works.

After using the Migration Assistant, I set off to replace as many PowerPC apps with Universal binaries as possible. I ended up deleting a bunch of PPC apps that I never actually used (MS Word Trial, FileMaker Pro trial, etc), and I couldn't find Universal binaries for the following:

• Dreamweaver 8
• Goliath
• Sloth
• pgAdmin 3
• LimeWire
• Tomato Torrent
• Google Earth
• GPG Keychain Access
• Flip4Mac (WMV video player)
• ZopeEditManager (heh)

The way I went about replacing my PPC apps with Universal or Intel ones was to open System Profiler (About This Mac -> More Info) and visit Software/Applications, and sort on "Kind", then I just googled around, downloaded, and replaced all my apps by dropping them in Applications on top of the old PowerPC ones.

For apps that I compiled myself (which were also converted by Migration Assistant, and unbelievably ran without fuss after the conversion, via Rosetta), I just ran "file" against them. Here's a binary that's Universal:

  [chrism@kingfish chrism]$ file /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/bin/python
  /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/bin/python: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
  /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/bin/python (for architecture i386):    Mach-O executable i386
  /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/bin/python (for architecture ppc):     Mach-O executable ppc

Here's a binary that's PPC and not Universal:

  [chrism@kingfish bin]$ file python
  python: Mach-O executable ppc

Pystones for a self-compiled Python 2.4.3 at one point were around 48000, but that has since dropped for some reason after futzing around to somewhere around 42000.

Notable things I had to do:

• Replace my old fink install. This wasn't strictly necessary, as the PPC version of Fink seemed to be running fine under Rosetta, but what the hell. An experimental version of Fink for Intel works fine. See this news item for the lowdown.
• Remove an Edirol USB adapter (music thingy) StartupItem from /Library/StartupItems that was causing panics on boot. I think this solved the problem anyway. The last bit of the panic.log message indicating the problem was something like " Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies): com.apple.iokit.IOHIDFamily(1.4.7)@0x35847000". Time will tell if I've fixed it. If it doesn't, I'm gonna be play dumb-end-user and call Apple because I can't find anything via Google about it.
• Replace DoubleCommand preference pane with a more recent universal build. Can't live without right-enter-as-fn-key.
• Replace DesktopManager with Virtue Desktops. Same code base, I guess, but more recent and Universal. I don't really like it quite as much, though.
• Get a Universal build of MenuMeters.

The good: it's fast (just as an example, the wall-time to run ~ 600 unit tests for a Zope customer project dropped from 46 seconds on the G4 to 20 seconds on the MBP). The screen is wider and brighter.

The bad: The palm rest and top vents are really hot. I don't know how to view Word or Excel files anymore (NeoOffice/J was it for me). Snapz Pro was cool. Can't play Halo on it (but I knew that when I bought it and that's what the iMac G5 is for ;-).

Haven't tried BootCamp or Parallels yet, but that's next up on the reconfiguration orgy.