"a leading position among the Unixes": that's the position that it already occupied: the biggest fish in a rapidly drying pond. The killer combo of free Unixes on commodity (read x86) hardware cannibalized the proprietary Unix market. Where that trajectory will lead has been obvious for quite some time now. Sun's measures to try to make Solaris survive that were a) port to x86 architecture and b) open source the OS. Jump out to a bigger pond, in other words.

Oracle's strategy with Solaris is going to be to squeeze every last penny from it, and when it dies it dies. Killing OpenSolaris and making it clear that open source releases of the code base will be done only "at some point" after the commercial release are just the beginning of that.

They will push Solaris in the same places where they currently push Oracle DB. Those places tend to be of very little interest to 99% of the HN croud. Java and web serving are not the kinds of things that justify stratospherically overpriced software licenses...

As for SPARC, I seriously doubt they will pour significant money into it. Trying to compete with x86 is akin to setting $100 bills on fire at this point. They will no doubt keep the Sun brand alive and use it to sell x86 based machines (which is the strategy Sun itself started of course).