Overall analysis of the new products

PowerMacs G5 dual core
At a first glance, the new PowerMac G5 looks pretty cool, mostly because of the dual-core and PCI-Express technologies. However, when you look further, you wonder a bit what the gain will really be for us users.
Let's start with the only real pro from my point of view: the power provided by dual-core on the high-end PowerMac, the Quad, which has the equivalent of four CPU. Even for the other ones, benchmarks (see here) have proved a significant increase in performances even if dual-core CPUs only have one data bus for two cores (it seems to be balanced by the 1MB cache for each core and the data-rate provided by DDR2 EEC).
PCI-Express (1 PCIe 16x, 1 PCIe 8x, 2 PCIe 4x) is a good thing for the future but as for now there is not a single Mac-compatible card using this format yet (the older ones are not compatible anymore either). On top of that, only two cards are available, including one which costs €1770! More about graphic cards here. Now we can just wait for ATI and NVidia to open their range of PCI products to Mac.
Apart from its design, the casing is poor, as usual. Only two hard-drive bays and one for the optical-drive. This is a real burden for a professional-oriented product.
As for the price, no change except for the high-end (the Quad) whose price was raised by USD300.
PowerBooks G4 "HD"par Val
It's a simplified range. There used to be 5 of them, now it's only 3, and the CPU frequencies remain the same. The 12-inch PowerBook is unchanged and corresponds to the former 12-inch SD. Each PowerBook now comes with built-in Superdrive.
The 15-inch comes now with digital line-in and digital line-out, and 128MB of DDR SDRAM for the video, which allows built-in support of the 30-inch Apple Cinema Display.
The 15-inch and the 17-inch Powerbooks do benefit from slight upgrades. Thus, the increase of screen resolution was a smart move and doesn't hamper the readability: there are now more pixels on the 15-inch PB than there used to be on the 17-inch former one (1440x960 vs 1440x900) and the new 17-inch PB now has as many pixels as a 20-inch Apple Cinema Display (1680x1050).
According to Apple, battery-life of the 15-ich and 17-inch PB has increased by two hours. Given that the batteries have remained the same, it could be a side-effect of the DDR2, which is less power hungry than DDR, and especially of its lower frequency (333MHz vs 533MHz). It is also probably the result of an overall optimization.
It's a shame that the G4 is still a 7447A instead of the 7448 which has more Level 2 cache memory (1MB vs 512KB). Even more when you know that the PowerBook G5 could have existed. The GPUs as well remain unchanged: no Pci-Express. We'll have to do with the ageing Radeon Mobility 9700 & GeForce FX 5200.
However, as long as you don't need a blowing computing power, these PowerBooks are still a good deal given the upgrade of the built-in features for the same price.