That’s a slightly unfair comparison. The Intel processors are better at some things, similar at other things, and worse at some things, in comparison to the IBM cpu. In the same way that intel and AMD are.

Check out this link…

http://www.macworld.com/2006/02/reviews/mbpromain/index.php

The benchmarks there tell a different story.

In terms of price, a new Dual Core 2.0 with a 20″ Cinema display costs about the same as a MacBookPro. Not $6k. Hehe. Creative licensing, I think so.

From everything I’ve seen, when both running natively, on average, the Intel and G5 are about the same. Which you’d expect. The G5 would have the edge if Apple had ever bothered to make use of it’s 64bit architecture. But they didn’t. It bodes well for the new Intel PowerMacs (MacPros?) in the future which will have double the clockspeed of the current ones.

As for developing Java on a laptop. Perfectly feasible. I’ve been doing it for years on a single cpu 1.6ghz Thinkpad. Compiling is always quick. It’s memory I miss.