In an interview (PDF) just posted on the Oracle site, Larry Ellison confirms his commitment to SPARC...

Once we own Sun we’re going to increase the investment in SPARC. We think designing our own chips is very, very important. Even Apple is designing its own chips these days. Right now, SPARC chips do some things better than Intel chips and vice-versa. For example, SPARC is much more energy efficient than Intel while delivering the same performance on a per socket basis. This is not just a green issue, it’s an economic issue. Today, database centers are paying as much for electricity to run their computers as they pay to buy their computers. SPARC machines are much less expensive to run than Intel machines.

This is really encouraging for both Sun employees and Sun customers. I suspect we may be seeing Rock coming to fruition after all, and Oracle's software will run like a dream on it.