USB Type-C: A Guide To Technology's Most Important New Standard

Meanwhile Apple doesn't give a frick, because cables should cost $30.

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a comparison to a thuderbolt cable

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Not the cable, but interface. USB Type-C cable has a pinout to support the USB 3.1 standard of 10Gbps, but if the cables hit the market before the ports do, adapters will limit your type-C cables to USB 3.0 speeds (5Gbps minus about 20%-30% encoding overhead).

The thunderbolt interface (which is not exclusive to Apple, by the way, as the technology belongs to Intel) is 20Gbps for all intents and purposes (Thunderbolt 2). Of course, no mechanical hard drive in the world comes close to saturating the bandwidth of either standard, and TB's bandwidth numbers are less of a selling point than its ability to extend PCIe and support high-resolution monitors or external GPU enclosures. It's just too damned expensive (the implementation and the peripherals) to be as practical as USB. Ironically, Thunderbolt presents security vulnerabilities because of the ability to attach a "malicious" external device that directly interfaces with the lowest level of hardware access -- OS X or not, doesn't matter when the malware already has free access to system memory and can do basically anything it wants, including defeat disk encryption. Firewire had/has a similar risk, and we see how popular that is now (But it didn't die for the security vulnerabilities, but rather lost the popularity contest in a case of standardization trumping innovation).

It's almost like a rehash of the USB/FireWire fight from 1999.

It's pretty much a comparable tech to Lightning cables right? Maybe these smaller USB ports will result in even thinner MacBook Airs.

Correct. 10Gbps + 5 amps >>>>>>>>>> 20Gbps proprietary thunderbolt