As predicted, Apple has unveiled a new line of towers for the Mac faithful, and as we speculated last month, it's all about the dual Woodcrest. The transition to Intel has made its stop at the PowerMac station, and more than the name is changing.

Calling it the high-end machine "customers have dreamed of," Steve Jobs said that the new "Mac Pro" towers will sport Xeon chipsets for Intel's new dual-core Xeon 5100 at speeds of up to 3GHz at launch (2.0, 2.66 and 3.0GHz across the spectrum). All models will ship with two physical CPUs, meaning two Xeons per tower. A dual 2.66GHz Xeon 5100 box with 1GB of RAM, an NIVIDIA GeForce 7300GT (256MB of RAM) and a 16x SuperDrive will cost $2499. Citing the oft-made claim that Apple computers are pricey, Jobs called it a "myth" and said that similar machines from Dell could run almost $1,000 more.

Jobs described the new towers as being significantly more powerful than the previous G5-based offerings, saying that they were 1.6 to 2.1 times faster than the G5 quad. As usual, the exact nature of the benchmark used was not clear.[Update: It is now listed as SPEC CPU2000.]

He also touted the interior of the case, which has been redesigned for the new architecture. The towers now have room for four hard drives (or up to 2 TB of storage), 4 PCIe slots including an extra-wide slot for graphics, and there's even room for a second optical drive. Interestingly, the exterior of the enclosure remains the same despite endless rumors stating that it would change. The new towers will also support up to 16GB of RAM.

Jobs also said that there will be an ATI Radeon X1900 XT upgrade soon. Additionally, Bluetooth and Airport are optional.

The new Mac Pro towers are shipping today.

Additional coverage of this year's WWDC is on the way...