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I've read posts from folks who started at 10.1 and upgraded all the way to 10.8 without any issues.

Unfortunately, this is not possible; 10.4 was the first release of OSX that supported Intel, and 10.5 was the last to support PowerPC. Alas, you can't have a machine that was on 10.1 that can also run 10.8..

That said, you can definitely chain update your way from 10.4 to 10.8 without issue, and similarly from 10.1 to 10.5. The latter case is a little tricky as many of the machines that ran 10.1 were not deemed fit for 10.5 (e.g. the G4 Cube variants), but there are workarounds.

Perhaps he means used these systems through upgrade/transfer installs via a firewire system transfer or similar

You can move bootdisks (physically or just the image) between a power based Mac to an Intel based mac. The OS is upgradable from 10.1 to 10.8, you just have to swap hardware around Leopard to make it work. :)

I routinely have coped my bootdisk from Mac to Mac as I upgraded systems.

Good point, I forgot about this.

I should know this actually, I built OS X Live DVDs back in the day...

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