I really hope they don't try to converge the interfaces too much. The design elements in Lion that were very iOS-like were IMHO the worst.
The thing is: pads and phones are fundamentally different kinds of devices. Their UI paradigm is designed around frequent but brief and relatively shallow interactions, while a PC is for deeper longer-term interactions. Trying convergence here seems like something very easy to botch horribly.
Agreed. You really can't have a hybrid of the two. It ends up being neither fish nor fowl -- a suboptimal experience in either form. Either rip off the band-aid, and go swiftly but painfully through the transition to pure-iOS on everything, or keep OSX and iOS relatively separate (if, perhaps, working gradually toward more interoperability).
My guess is that Apple is waiting for the day when cloud computing is the standard, and there is no longer a great deal of need for the hardware-based functionality or design of a laptop. When that day comes, a simple iOS-style interface might be fine for everything. In the meantime, however, there are still plenty of distinct use cases for Macs and iDevices. Arguably, we're still in the awkward adolescence of cloud computing. We know it's going to grow up quickly, but that day isn't quite here yet.
(And let's not forget that Apple is a hardware company and, accordingly, is probably hesitant to hasten the demise of any of its key hardware lines).
In Microsoft's case, they're building a completely new UI for both PC and Tablet form factors in Windows 8, and from trying the Developer Preview, it seems to work OK on PC (although it does need a lot of tweaking)
The thing is: pads and phones are fundamentally different kinds of devices. Their UI paradigm is designed around frequent but brief and relatively shallow interactions, while a PC is for deeper longer-term interactions. Trying convergence here seems like something very easy to botch horribly.