Elsewhere (Sun's forums in fact) someone came to the conclusion that this whole thing only affects the (SAL) software accelleration layer and not the HAL (hardware layer).
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me, and it's what I conclude as well on rereading the info Microsoft puts forward.
Avalon will mainly replace GDI+, which is something most people programming DX or OpenGL avoid anyway because it's slow.
On top of that Avalon seems to offer the capability of being used as a layer on top of DX AND (and that's the thing people are ranting about) of routing DX and OpenGL calls through Avalon (which will then translate them to something else for specialised hardware I guess).
Microsoft states clearly that doing that will incur a performance penalty (which is hardly unreasonable to expect as you're moving operations from the videohardware into the CPU which not only isn't optimised for those operations but also has other things to do).

A rather timely 'aside' to the contention that information shouldn't receive credence until it comes from the 'horses mouth'.

I've just this minute received in my inbox the Press Release direct from Microsoft which spells out pricing details for Xbox360. The details in it, and the fact that it was about to be released I've known about for a week. The information in it matches precisely what I've been seeing from special interest discussion groups for over 6 months!

In most cases, 'official' statements add little more than the "doh!!!" factor

cheers.

Will this 64 bit crap mean that you can do two 32 bit processes, or will this mean that the processes are just larger? Or did that make no sense at all?

Take for instance the size of an Integer on a 32 bit machine. It's normally 8 bytes, does this mean that it will be the same size on a 64 bit machine, or will the Integers size change to 16 bytes?

errmm....

Just like XP, Windows Vista is a 32-bit OS. Just like XP, Windows Vista will have a separate 64-bit version. No matter what version of Windows you run, native 64-bit desktop applications programs are a long way off yet

Maybe so, but you can't rely on anything that's not from an official statement to be correct.
There's too many rumours out there, and most of them are based either on wishful thinking, misinterpretation (deliberate or not) of older official statements, or just made up out of malice.
Remember the "Microsoft is changing DOS to make it imcompatible with Lotus 1-2-3" myths from the 1980s and early 1990s? Many people believed that, even after they got that new DOS version and 1-2-3 still worked (they just thought Microsoft had failed to do what they wanted to). In fact Microsoft went out of their way to make sure 1-2-3 WOULD work, as it was the main application used by many of their own customers and thus having it work was vital for their sales...

Shows how much I know.