Thinking about the iPhone and its impressive use of OS X - and Apple's name change from Apple Computer to Apple Inc. - I wonder if Steve Jobs is finally ready to lead his company out of the PC business once and for all.

Apple is clearly covering the consumer electronics space - with iPods, a PC-to-TV streaming device (or more likely an iPod-to-TV stream), and the iPhone. All of these show that OS X can be a powerful embedded OS for devices. Coupled with web services like iTunes (will we see a namechange there too, to something like iMedia?), the company's growth is entirely(?) built on consumer market devices.

Now throw in the emerging Web OS and Steve's new willingness to offer standards-based services like Yahoo mail and Google maps - and the fact that Macs now run on Intel and run Windows natively - and you can finally think about the irrelevance of the PC operating system. In my daily computing life, Firefox is the operating system, not Mac or Windows. Indeed, I pretty seamlessly bop back and forth between the two - since all my data is stored online.

As Apple shows with the iPhone, though, OS X can be profoundly leveraged into realms where the computing experience makes a huge difference. And unlike PCs, phones are a realm where Apple can license its OS into Microsoft-like dominance.

What do you think? Am I reaching here?