Based on the way Apple has pushed towards standardizing formats in the past, I would think Apple would incorporate Blu-ray sooner than most people expect. I think Blu-ray will win, but I wouldn't count on Sony alone influencing the market enough to win the format wars (how many of us enjoyed renting and watching our Betamax movies or listening to our songs in ATRAC3?) Actually, I fully agree with the comments Bill Gates makes (scary!) about HD-DVD vs Blu-ray in this Businessweek article:
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/oct2005/id20051021_469296.htm
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates echoed similar sentiments in a speech given recently at Howard University in Washington D.C. -- perhaps that is also why MS has decided to stay with DVD-9 for the Xbox 360.
"The home activity of the future will be very digital, we actually call it the digital lifestyle," he said. "Your music, of course, is already moving away from being on a physical media to just being on a hard disk or streamed across the Internet. My daughter, who's 9, asked me as we went into a record store what a record was, and, of course, she's never seen a record, and five years from now people will say what's a CD, why did you have to go to the case and open something up and you couldn't sequence it your own playlist way; that will be a thing of the past."
Gates continued, "Likewise, even for videos that will happen. The format that's under discussion right now, HD versus Blu-ray, that's simply the last physical format we'll ever have. Even videos in the future will either be on a disk in your pocket or over the Internet and therefore far more convenient for you. You can organize things the way you want and it will show up on all these different devices."