An analyst (Ben Reitzes of Barclays Capital) thinks that as soon as the end of this year the MacBook Air line may be running on ARM chips as opposed to Intel. This assumption may well come from reports that were suggesting Apple will be switching to ARM for MacBooks in 2013. The cost and time overheads to get OSX running on ARM would be considerable, but could the arrival of Lion have anything to do with this?
With Lion being in development it would be easier to enable running it on both Intel and ARM architecture. Impact on developers could be considerable as there are no ARM processors around right now that will upstage Intel’s 64 bit multi core tech. However the benefits of battery life and size of future laptops like the MAcBook Air could be too much to ignore