The additional memory requirements were expecteed.

I was informed that the increase performance over the PPC iMacs means some applications using Rosetta will actually run faster. Have you done any testing that substantiates this claim?

I have not done any formal benchmarks but Epson's Film Factory 3 seems to actually run faster emulated on the Intel iMac than native on my old PowerMac G4 dual 1.25 (after the initial launch delay).

The biggest endorsement I can give to the new iMac is that I have not booted up my old PowerMac since I copied over all my files and settings.

I would strongly suggest not getting any less than 1GB of RAM, in the future when everything is Universal 512MB may work. I have 1GB currently and will probably add another 512MB or 1GB in the near future.

I would say - you need 2.5Gb RAM for a Mac with OSX. I'm working yet with 1Gb and it is absolutely not enough.

Surely that depends on what you're doing?

768mb in my ibook is absolutely fine as all I use it for is email/surfing and occasionally vnc.

1gb in the intel mini is absolutely fine as all it use it for is a frontrow media player and occasionally running solaris in parallels workstation.

2.5gb in my dual g5 is woefully inadequate when i'm dealing with large data sets exceeding 10gb... paging all over the place.

The only thing for certain is that 256mb is almost universally too small. 512mb is prob about ok for simple stuff like surfing, and 1gb is a comfortable minimum for doing lots of work with photos or running virtual pcs.