Jobs' health problems, which lead to some missed press events and keynotes in the past, is being remembered, and now conflated, with what is a long-standing hot war between the parties that run the expo, and Apple/Jobs. Macworld NY was moved (back) to Boston over Steve Jobs' objections. Doing that was dumb, and lead to the death of the East Coast Macworld.
Jobs has wanted to exit his west coast stage for years. Now that the Apple Stores are rolled out, and Apple is a consumer company who targets product ship cycles for Christmas and "Back to School", Jobs can safely knife the MWSF baby. Yes, it hurts to us Mac "prosumers" and evangelists. but Apple cannot reveal new product on someone else's schedule, simply because they used to and it's cool to go for some (myself included.)
I will miss the keynotes, but when Jobs put up the "Apple Stores = X MacWorlds per day" of foot traffic stat on a slide many years ago, the writing was on the wall (pardon the pun.)
Also, WWDC seems safe and burgeoning, so we will get Jobsian spoken word in long form once a year, I believe.
