Apple kills off those little plastic discs we used to spend our allowance on in junior high school

So the entire computer-using world has been freaking out all day over Mac's Keynote Live presentation, including the new MacBook Air -- the smallest/lightest notebook ever, yada yada yada (check out the advertisment for it at here at Valleywag.)  Gary and I were sitting here reading about it as it all leaked, and this whole no-CD/DVD drive thing is probably the gutsiest move ever. Our first reaction -- whaaaaaaaaaaat? OH MY GOD, THAT WAY YOU HAVE TO BUY FROM iTUNES AND HAVE NO REASON TO BUY CDS IF YOU WANT MUSIC ON YOUR COMPUTER. And then they announced iTunes movie rentals, and when you think of this in conjunction with Netflix's recent announcement about movies being available online... Is the average consumer ready, at this point, to entirely forget about those little plastic discs? Maybe not yet, but it's definitely a huge slap in the face to tangible media.  Apple's basically saying that the age of CDs and DVDs is over or will soon be over -- and they're doing what they can to hasten the transition.  

And have you read all this stuff about the new iPhone? It's like Facebook plus Radiohead, seriously. Basically, if you're savvy with that kind of thing and want to write an app or widget for the iPhone, you can submit it to Apple, and then users pay-as-they-wish for them, and you go home with 70% of whatever profit you make (and I'm assuming obviously Apple takes the other 30%). So programmers get to feel that they're freelance developers for Apple, potentially get thrown a few bucks for their work, and meanwhile Apple probably gets some rights to all this new software and is automatically in on the loop for whatever new innovative stuff is being developed for their hardware... It's pretty crazy to think of your phone as now being full of user-generated content.