I don't know if they were being nice or not but I think they pretty much also <i>had</i> to make it 4:3. I have a convertible netbook (Gigabyte T1028X) and its wide screen is ugly in vertical orientation. Books look really weird formatted that way. Web pages too. The only saving grace is that I can dock an OSK at the bottom and the remaining area is more or less 4:3 and I get the keyboard there too, at the same time. That's handy at times. But still looks ugly. So seeing how beautiful is important to Apple and how they want it to be usable in any orientation, I don't think they had a choice.