I'm sympathetic to this view but PA6T wasn't going to solve Apple's problems: it was clearly better than the G4, but Apple needed G5-level performance in their next generation laptops as table stakes, and PA6T just doesn't get there (see the AmigaOne X1000 as an example). It also was not at all clear at the time how scalable the microarch was, and it was coming from a company with even fewer (albeit some brilliant, as Apple has proven) engineering resources, so it would have been a big bet that Apple did not want to lose. We'll never know the answer, of course.
