Looks like someone's spiked the Poland Spring with Happy Juice again. By now you've surely heard that the Wall Street analysts are climbing back on board the Apple bandwagon again, and probably the biggest buzz of the moment is that, as Forbes reports, Morgan Stanley has "drastically raised estimates" on Apple and instituted a practically unthinkable $60 price target. To put that into perspective, you might recall the shocked uproar back in November when Piper Jaffray upped its AAPL target to $100-- and that was before the split, meaning that Morgan Stanley's new estimate is equivalent to $120 by comparison. In other words-- and to put it in strictly technical terms-- Apple is currently generating "mad props" from the suits. Word.

So why the big ol' upgrade? Well, apparently Morgan Stanley recently conducted a survey of Apple customers which reveals that "users of iPods had a 19 percent PC to Macintosh platform conversion rate compared with a street expectation of 10 percent"-- and yup, that sure sounds like a good reason to shower the company with upgrades to us. Seriously, just think about it for a second: one in five Windows users who buy an iPod eventually winds up buying a Mac, too. Morgan Stanley's done the math (that's what they get paid for, we suppose) and figures that the iPod halo effect might lead to Apple raking in a jaw-dropping $16.942 billion in revenue this calendar year, up nearly 22 percent from its previous estimate of $13.914 billion. If that's not enough to get your ticker thumpin', just take a gander at Morgan Stanley's revenue estimate for Apple's calendar 2006: $25.657 billion. Up over 48 percent from its previous $17.268 billion estimate. Someone fetch our heart pills, because we do believe we are gettin' the vapors.

If the sheer enormity of the piles of cash doesn't get your salivary glands working overtime, then consider the implications for Apple's PC market share, which has been hovering in the 2 or 3 percent range for ages now; even the most die-hard Apple fan will admit that's downright pathetic if you get him drunk enough. But with the iPod converting so many Wintel users to Orthodox Macintoshism, Morgan Stanley figures that Apple's global PC market share might jump as high as 5 percent-- this calendar year. And the firm thinks that things might get even rosier than that, with the iPod-owning-Wintel-user conversion rate rising from 19 percent to as high as 25 percent moving forward.

If that turns out to be true, we hereby take back every single negative thing we've ever said about the iPod (yes, even our longstanding objection to its lack of support for the Klingon and Pig Latin languages) and offer to buy it some ice cream. Heck, even a double scoop. It obviously deserves it.

Now, before you all go completely ga-ga over Morgan Stanley's predictions, it's probably worth keeping in mind that a single survey-- particularly one for which we know absolutely zero details about its methodology or scope-- isn't exactly gospel. Not that we're going to argue, of course; we just saw our AAPL stock edge upwards by six bits to $43.70 on a day when the markets overall were down. If that's the start of a gradual run-up to $60 per share, all the better, but hey, we'll even take the short-term boost, you know?

That said, we have to admit it: when it comes to Morgan Stanley's iPod-based Mac share predictions, we're way over on the believers's side of the fence. After all, if the masses are finally smart enough to see that the iPod is a zillion times better than everything else out there, why wouldn't they realize the same thing about the Macintosh? 10 percent share by 2008!