Who would step up to fill this void, Apple or Linux?
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Nobody would step up. People would complain and refuse to buy anything from Microsoft's competitors, just like now. Well, Apple would gain users, I think; but Novell and Sun would only gain very few.
Would IBM attempt to revise an early attempt at an OS?
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An early attempt like OS/2? IBM would probably fail to re-introduce OS/2.
Does Sun Micro Systems have an OS ready to put into place?
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Yes. Solaris is quite usable.
Is there possibly another OS in the works just looking for a place to land?
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Palm might offer BeOS again.
Why hasn’t Apple released its Mac OS to the general public?
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??? They have. Maybe you mean "Why does Mac OS only run on Apple-made computers?". The reason is two-fold.
First, it is extremely expensive to support all the hardware out there and only Microsoft can do it. Market forces make it so that only one vendor has the market share needed to support development of that scale.
Second, if you are not the market leader, you must make your money elsewhere to support your operating system. Hence most other OS vendors, like Apple or Sun or Novell, make their money from either hardware or consulting or services or network products. In Apple's case it's the hardware. If Apple's hardware sales would go down, they would not have the resources to support their OS development any more.
There is a third reason in that Mac OS' greatest advantages over Windows have very much to do with the fact that it doesn't have to support such a great range of hardware configurations. Plug and play in Mac OS works because Mac OS has to deal with fewer configurations.
Mac OS X on generic hardware would not be fun. You'd have unsupported graphics adapters, likely no sound, installation problems of Windows proportions, and a whole lot of (stupid) support calls about problems arising when users refuse to read the manual.
If people wanted an alternative to Windows, they would have used OS/2 in the past or Novell's SuSE Linux now.
(Sun Solaris is being offered for non-Sun hardware but you get all those driver problems. Buy it with Sun hardware, and you have an amazingly well-supported OS which works a lot better than Windows or Mac OS, but supports very little consumer hardware like cameras and PDAs and what not.)
If they did, how many of you would jump at the chance to use the Mac OS.
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Between 5% and 10% of users jump at the chance now. If Microsoft would stop selling software Apple's market share would probably double while the majority of Microsoft's customers would simply use the last version of Windows forever (and third parties would support them and extend Windows, like it has been done with OS/2).
I have used OS/2 at home in the 90s, Solaris at the university, BeOS and then Linux and then Mac OS X at home since 1998, and BSD and then Windows in the office.
All of these operating systems worked well, but Solaris, Mac OS X, and BeOS stood out:
Solaris was the most robust and stable of the lot. We used mostly terminals connected to a server serving thousands of users for files and dozens of users for terminal sessions and everyone was surprised when the server had to be restarted more often than once per semester.
BeOS was the fastest. No comparison.
And Mac OS X is the most user-friendly and least annoying (i.e. no windows suddenly steal focus, selecting text always works exactly as expected, configuration options are not hidden behind a myriad of Windows and there are no pop-ups telling me that there are pop-ups etc.).
Linux was and still is to difficult to use. Installation is easy now, but it is never obvious how you are supposed to configure a network adapter etc..
OS/2 was too slow.
