The media wags and flame-baiters will have a nice run through early January until MacWorld shuts them up. Steve Jobs had a wink in his voice when he projected Leopard's Spring delivery during his WWDC keynote.

For Apple, there is no Spring (the tune, "in heaven there is no beer" inexplicably just came to mind). Apple has exactly two opportunities per year to draw mass press and public attention: January and August. I suppose that Apple could view some combination of 64-bit MacBook Pros, eight-core Mac Pros and probably the announcement, but not delivery of SAS/SATA Xserve RAID as a full marquee for Macworld Expo. But I think it would be a strategic problem if a full round of 64-bit gear went out with Tiger, with Leopard held out almost as a Vista-like tease (and a $$ upgrade for very recent buyers).

Apple's Senior VP of Software Engineering, Bertrand Serlet, who I think is the sharpest knife in Apple's executive kitchen, laid the foundation for a Vista vs Tiger battle with a funny and convincing comparison of Vista's GUI and its few bundled apps with the Tiger GUI and app features from which Vista's great ideas were derived. Serlet's message was that even if Vista lands before Leopard does, Tiger will still show Vista to be a derivative work. Seen another way, Serlet's presentation was meant to show that Microsoft had plagiarized elements of Tiger while Apple had already gone several laps past its own best OS/application environment.

It's interesting that although Microsoft borrowed heavily from Tiger's look and feel, Microsoft didn't capture the human-factored behavior that spawned Tiger's visual elements. At its heart, Vista is Windows, plus a collection of modernized UI widgets for developers and a bucket for the marketable ideas that emerged from Microsoft Research. Tiger and Leopard bake consistent behavior, look and feel and integration into everything from its dev tools to its Web browser. Vista can't go there: Windows will always be an operating system. Don't get me wrong; Vista is a huge step for Windows, a real godsend for those stuck in the Windows XP rut. But Apple will retain the state-of-the-art title, and applications will still rank it #1 in their compendium of best places to live.

Oh, and did you catch the quip in Steve Jobs' WWDC speech about Leopard not requiring on-line activation? I wonder if journalists bring this up. Perhaps the best of them will go searching for Apple Genuine Advantage or its like and marvel at its absence. I expect, though, that we'll read the supposition that Apple's IP protection for its client platform is covert.