small point...
Novell may have no intention of offering SLED or whatever on ARM
openSUSE will be available on ARM if openSUSE choose to do it, openSUSE != Novell
Commercial Linux distributor Novell today announced that the openSUSE Project, which drives the development variant of its Linux, will support the creation and packaging of various Linuxes for ARM processors using the openSUSE Build Service version 1.6. According to Novell, the support for building application stacks and Linux …
Every open source OS and their dog can support ARM as a bulid target, and have done for many years. The fact that a specific distro has broadened its horizons away from x86 doesn't really say much.
What are the actual *platforms* this build can run on?
It's all very well saying 'ooh, it runs on ARM! That's used for everything smaller than a laptop!' but I guarantee you that you won't be running this on your PDA or your smartphone or your washing machine out of the box.
But will it do "first-generation" ARM targets?
This architecture is no longer encumbered by patents, nor is it particularly encumbered today by the price of memory (32 bits for a register-to-register MOV was always seen as a bit on the wasteful side, but it's nothing compared to the code bloat in Windows). So it's a prime candidate to be cloned by a far-East manufacturer, as long as a suitable software stack can be put together.