While the mobile computing era was obviously born quite a while back, iSuppli’s report would seem to make its advent official. “This marks a major event in the PC market because it marks the start of the age of the notebook,” said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst for compute platforms at iSuppli. “The notebook PC is no longer a tool only for the business market, or a computer for the well-off consumer; it’s now a computer for everyone. While the third quarter will be remembered as the time when the scale of the global economic/credit crunch truly became apparent, the PC market managed to deliver strong unit shipment growth during the period.”

There’s a lot of emphasis at this unveiling on environmental concerns, reducing the footprint for manufacturing the new notebooks.

Says Ives: “We’ve refined every detail in service of the user.”

Steve Jobs announces that it’s time for Q&A, but with a caveat. No questions about the economy, he says, or Apple’s financial performance because there will be an earnings report next week. And no questions about “my health,” he adds, as a new slide appears on the big screen above him showing his blood pressure.

As the audience laughs, Jobs welcomes Apple COO Tim Cook and Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, to the stage to take questions from the audience.

Apple (AAPL) does not have an exclusive on the new Nvidia chip, but it will be first to market. “And we’re buying a lot of chips.”

Why no Blu-ray? “Blu-ray is just a bag of hurts,” says Jobs. Apple is waiting things out before “passing that cost burden on to consumers.”

Jobs expects the redesigns to trigger a refresh cycle in both the MacBook and MacBook Pro.

Someone asks why there are no matte screens. Answer: “The vast majority of our customers prefer a glossy finish.”

The 17-inch MacBook Pro is still available, but it has not been refreshed like the other models.

Final question: “Do touchscreens make sense on laptops?” Jobs’s reply: “We’ve experimented with them, but they don’t make a lot of sense to us.”

So no tablet.

And with that, the event is over.

Virtually everyone agrees that “OS X Leopard is far superior to Vista,” says Cook. He goes on to tout the Mac’s software. He speaks of compatibility and Boot Camp, which allows Windows to be run on a Mac.

Cook notes that Microsoft Vista’s failure at market–one of the greatest missteps in Microsoft (MSFT) history, according to Cook–has afforded Apple (AAPL) an unprecedented opportunity to win over Windows users to the Mac platform. He says Apple retail stores receive 400,000 visitors a day and that 50 percent of the company’s sales are now to Windows users.

Mac has outgrown the market 14 out of last 15 quarters, Cook continues. The Mac retail share has grown to 18 percent of U.S. retial sales, with a revenue share of over 31 percent, which means that one out of every three dollars spent on computers is spent on a Mac. Quite an achievement.

Finally, Cook points out that Macs now account for 47 percent of computers at universities. Apple has sold more Macs in in the last three quarters than it sold in all of 2007.