Why wouldn't it be possible? Rosetta isn't installed automatically, but has to be chosen when Slow Leopard is installed. And Lion does not come with Rosetta.
I'm not a person who has ever written code, so I am at a bit of a disadvantage, but it doesn't make my query unreasonable. It seems to me that a team focussed on Lion, incorporating the unsupported Snow Leopard that has Rosetta as an add-on, could drop the Rosetta ball. I'm sure that stranger things have happened.
I am a person who has designed, coded, and tested hundreds of thousands of lines of code and from what I have seen of Apple's software development process over the years I can safely say, the omission of Rosetta was clearly
not an oversight. Apple broadcast their intentions to drop Rosetta when it became an optional install in Snow Leopard. At that point if developers did not migrate their code to the Intel platform they were signaling their loss of interest in the product and users who were listening should have begun seeking alternatives.
It has been Apple's practice, from their very beginnings to drop support for obsolete hardware and software technologies as they add support for newer hardware and software technologies. Apple has always broadcast their intentions for dropping a technology well in advance and when necessary providing a bridging technology such as the Classic Environment in earlier releases of OS X and more recently Rosetta. But those bridging technologies are never intended to be permanent and will be dropped usually after a couple of OS X upgrades. These bridging technologies are intended to allow time for developers to adapt to the new platform or users to find alternative applications.
If you are looking for a platform that provides support for code going all the way back to the dark ages of personal computing, Dell will be more than happy to accommodate you.
