Dedicated H.264 in new Macs?

The latest Apple related rumour to be doing the rounds is that all future Mac's will include H.264 encoding and decoding capabilities in hardware. Robert Cringely steps up to the pulpit and gives some valid reasons why the addition of a dedicated chip for performing this task will be added to everything from the lowly MacMini through to the biggest Mac Pro. Who after all would argue with solid playback across the whole range and cutting edge encoding for Pro's and consumers alike? While this addition may have made sense in the past, there are a few reasons why I cannot see it happening now.
H.264 is the current in-codec, but this will change. Not for some years but that's the way the industry works, technology moves on no matter how well designed and scalable it is.
While all but the most powerful of the older PPC based Macs had trouble running full quality 1080p streams without dropping frames and using every ounce of CPU available, this isn't the case with newer Intel Mac's. While Altivec was a good match for this sort of processing, things are even better with the pure horsepower of the Core series of CPU's and Intel have specially tuned libraries just for this sort of task. Even the lowliest of currently available Intel Mac's can cope with decoding of 720p, something that is a huge leap from the old days. (Note, the older Core Solo Mac Mini did have trouble with 720p but is no longer available). For 1080p anything from the low-end iMac up will be fine.
Finally there's GPU acceleration. This is an area that Nvidia, ATI and Intel have put a lot of work into. Any ATI GPU currently available in a Mac can accelerate H.264 and there has been a lot of work on acclerated encoding too. Not to miss out on the fun, similar features are available on current Nvidia GPU's including all those currently available in Macs. Finally there's Intel's lowly integrated graphics solutions. While these are often berated, integrated graphics are the most common out there in the real world and solutions from all parties have been steadily moving forwards. 3D support is finally getting some love with OS's moving towards utilising 3D acceleration in the main OS (see Quartz/Core Image in OS X, XGL in Linux and Aero in Vista) and video playback is moving right up there. The current GMA945 series isn't quite there for H.264 following it's predecessor in concentrating on MEPG2 but the new G965 Express series which will undoubtedly appear in low-end Macs in the form of the GMA X3000 should move things forwards considerably.
So, if everyone can play 720p with the hardware currently available, most can do 1080p and the roadmaps show nothing but enhancements to encoding and decoding with current and upcoming hardware, why spend more on adding a dedicated chip? If we're going to see such a chip anywhere it would be in one of the consumer devices such as a new video iPod or Apple TV, not I suspect in an already versatile computer. Perhaps Cringely has his wires crossed and this is what we will see, or perhaps the 'dedicated hardware' he expects is actually the new Intel chipsets themselves, or a combination of solutions from Intel, AMD/ATI and Nvidia. Or he's spot on and this is the start of Apple's iTunes-like push into video.