Apple is to be blamed big time for breaking backwards compatibility like this, but as usual their legion of fans will make up excuses.
I have to disagree. Apple maintained backwards compatibility for 5 years. They moved to the x86 ISA in 2006, but continued on supporting PowerPC binaries through
Rosetta until it got dropped in summer 2011 with the release of OS X Lion. If you want to run PowerPC binaries, you can use Rosetta on OS X Snow Leopard.
Honestly, I used to hate those huge
universal binaries that took around twice the time to download. The move to Intel-only spared me to download all the unnecessary cruft.