Installing Leopard (Mac OS X) on non-Apple hardware

The so called Hackintosh or OSX86 has been fascinating me for a couple of weeks. With the migration to Intel hardware a couple of years back, I have been trying to work out why it is difficult to install Leopard on a Mac. 

Yes – I can see that Apple might not like it, and I note that it’s contrary to their licence agreement (at least on one interpretation: as a lawyer I find their language ambiguous on this key topic “on an Apple desktop or server computer”.  This could be read as Apple qualifying both the desktop and the server or as just the former.  Normal legal drafting conventions would have the former being the case: if you want to avoid ambiguity you either qualify both or you say something like ”

on

(i) a desktop computer; or

(ii) a server;

that is supplied by Apple”

i.e. you use numbering and indenting to make it clear that your qualification applies to each item in the list.

But apart from the legalities, what stops anyone from just bunging the Leopard retail DVD in the drive?  

So EFI vs BIOS is one such barrier.  But EFI emulators are easy to get hold of these days.  The rest, surely is just drivers (and therein, I suspect, lies the rub): the install app within Leopard is pretty automated and assumes a specific driver set.  It has to be reasonably flexible to allow for different graphics and other PCI cards in the server builds, but that’s it.  the motherboards are all prescribed so things like power management must be done the Apple way.  And if you don’t get the power management drivers right at boot time then you’re likely to get freezes pretty quickly, if you can get the thing to boot up at all.

I’m far from a hardware guru, but is this really so difficult? the architectures are all pretty similar.  I’m tempted to try it for myself, but I can see myself getting a little too obsessed with getting the little things working: (spending a day trying to find a driver for the onboard HD audio [on a headless server!)…  

If anyone has any experience or insights, i’d love to hear.