Snow Leopard Selling like Hotcakes? Duh!

Analysts are speculating Apple’s latest OS release, OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is outpacing Leopard sales by a 2 to 1 margin in their opening two weeks. Apple hasn’t released any official sales figures, but guys that get paid for accurate estimates say Snow Leopard is quickly approaching 6 million copies sold compared to roughly 2.8 million copies of Leopard for the same period after its release.    Is this a surprise to anyone? Does anybody have any doubts why?
Snow Leopard is CHEAP! At $29 Apple is almost giving it away. I paid the same price to upgrade Quicktime to the "Pro" version over two years ago!  Buying the “Family Pack”  of five licenses (like I did) makes the price almost ludicrous.  I pre-ordered it from Amazon and got the reduced price of $43, making the price to upgrade a paltry $9 per machine. That's only nine bucks more than Ubuntu! I've paid more for crappy text editors.
It’s clear Apple doesn't see Snow Leopard as a profit center. So what are they up to offering "The world’s most advanced operating system” for less than ten bucks? I can think of a couple of motives.
1) Penetration.  With no real aesthetic reasons to upgrade to 10.6, users need some motivation to go to the trouble of installing a new OS.  At $29 or less, the question becomes, "Why not?"  I really wanted to get it running on my new MacBook Pro to see if it made my already ridiculously fast laptop even faster. Plus, I’ve had such a positive experience with the 64 bit versions of Windows (Vista & 7) I hoped I would see the same step change in Snow Leopard performance. That didn't happen, but I have to admit to being very pleased with the few tweaks Apple did to the UI and the extra hard drive space is always welcome.  I think there are some really big plans brewing in Cupertino that require the new architecture and I can't think of a better way to penetrate a market than virtually giving the technology away.
2) Distancing themselves from the PowerPC. With the move to Intel in 2005, Apple piled all its chips on the x86 & x64 architectures.  Now, the current Apple operating system won’t even install on the abandoned platform. Very shortly, PowerPC owners are going to feel really left out.  Especially if there are some hot software titles released in the near future stamped “Snow Leopard Only”.  PowerBooks and G5s will quickly become doorstops if some future releases of Photoshop or FinalCut won’t even install on them. One big philosophical difference between Cupertino and Redmond is the latter's reluctance to kiss old legacies goodbye. Apple, conversely seems to have little or no trouble telling its users that it’s time to move on. Nothing spurs sales figures like rendering a big chunk of technology obsolete.
Whatever their motives, Apple is succeeding getting Snow Leopard to the masses. I’m sure my guesses don’t even scratch the surface of their real plans. It is so unlike them to give something away unless it’s part of a larger plan for world domination (iTunes?). Whatever the reasons, we users win. For now.