New Mac under Intel and Windows

Many of you wish to know whether new Intel based Macs will be able to boot on Windows or Linux x86. Here's the beginning of an answer.
As we said yesterday, tne new Macs don't have a BIOS but a (much more advanced) EFI firmware. Until now, commercialized versions of Windows do not support this firmware on IA32 platform (Intel 32bit) as opposed to the IA64 platform (Itanium). The next version of Windows (Vista) will support it, but it will take some time to find it on shelves.
As for Linux, hope is somehow bigger. EFI support is included in newer kernels and a bootloader already exists (ELILO). As this one was done for Itanium in particular, we'll have to see if it will require patches to work on IA32. Yet as the Linux community is very reactive, a patch is a question of weeks whatsoever.
As for the opposite, a Mac OS X boot on any type of PC, it will take the first PCs with EFI IA32 distributed instead of the old BIOS. This will surely not be before Windows Vista is released.