I for one hope it will, or at least there be some kind of emulation so I can run Palm software that I prefer. It's not so far fetched.
iPhone will suck The iPhone will be a closed platform, i.e. no 3rd party apps. :-( Also, as far as I know it uses an ARM CPU of some kind, so no Intel VT. ;-)
VT is nice but not critical to running VM's on a system. Think OS/2, Java, or Solaris 10. All are capable of running or being virtual machines without Intel's help. But to be honest, there has to be a market for it. If there are 10 million cell phones out there then that is a market worth developing for. One thing I noted, for example, is the iPhone and GPS are not fuzzy warm buddies. So there's room to grow. How you get into it I don't know Just pipe dreams now.
Correct, but without silicon support, virtualization requires execution of many more instruction per guest instruction (whether it's the same instruction set or not) so performance will suffer. Try turning off VT support in Parallels and compare performance with VT on. Also, a previous comment suggested an ARM processor in the iPhone. It's possible that an ARM processor is one of several processors in the unit. More than one processor is common in today's handsets.