The average user has no idea what Intel means. The average user doesn't make a thousand posts about Nvidia support (not even pros do, as they simply want the best options available at a reasonable price, whether they're branded Nvidia or AMD). Again, the average user will keep buying Apple products as long as they're satisfied with them. And there's literally no downside in the ARM switch. I don't know how many of you watched the keynote, but Rosetta 2 ran a 16-million polygons model in Maya (for Intel), with colours, shaders, effects and all at native speed; it also ran a fairly recent Intel game at full speed and high framerate.
Basically, the aforementioned average user will end up with considerably faster Macs and little to no x86 incompatibility: I fail to see how Cook supposedly messed this up. Intel has been lagging behind all of its competitors: ARM chips are getting faster and faster, AMD offers better performances (on the high-end range, the difference is abysmal). Apple had to choose whether to move forward or keep delivering "meh" Macintoshes.
I still remember, even though I was definitely younger, when Apple switched to Intel. Most people said that PowerPC was a superior platform, that Intel was slower and that people would stop buying Macs and Apple would end up licensing Mac OS X. All of them were wrong, just like they will be now. To be honest, I was annoyed at how little progress Intel has been making in the past years, how their roadmap is far from exciting and how Macs do not really deliver a premium performance, on their base models at least (models that cost as much as premium PCs). At least, during the Snow Leopard era, Macs were priced reasonably and offered features, materials, designs and apps that no PC could give you. Finally, with ARM CPUs Apple will be able to surpass Intel like it did with their PowerPC G3 and G4 before the Intel Core line: if the cheapest iPad is faster than most notebooks, imagine what Apple can do with a desktop custom-chip.
Concerning the hackintosh world, yes, it is ending, albeit not immediately. Bear in mind that Apple supported PowerPC CPUs for four years. But most PowerPC machines were already either old, or anyway running on old processors. The PowerPC G5 debuted in 2003: basically, they had 6 years of OS updates (3 of which after switch, sorry for the pun), and were still supported until 2011. Nowadays, with the resources Apple has at its disposal and the large number of Intel machines, we can rest assured that Intel Macs will be supported for at least 5, 6 years. As the new Mac Pro was introduced just last year, Apple can't relinquish those pro users: I wouldn't be surprised if Intel versions will keep coming as long as there's a significant number of Mac Pros running.
Think of the hackintosh adventure as both a Mac OS trial version and an opportunity to learn: after building, understanding and overcoming years of "hardships", anything below actual coding is trivial to most of us. I've always been keen on computers, but I'm grateful for everything I learnt and experienced for free, thanks to Tonymac and their staff, but also thanks to many other, concurrent websites like InsanelyMac. Personally speaking, I'll run my desktop as long as I can: when the time comes, I'll replace it with an ARM Macbook, as Mac hardware will finally be worth Apple's prices. Besides, it's not like every new Mac OS version revolutionises the OS: even 10 years from now, building a cheap hackintosh, e.g. stuck on Mac OS 11.5, as your secondary/living room computer won't be a bad idea at all (just like many people keep running not-up-to-date Windows 10 iterations, Windows 8 and even 7).
