I suppose "in theory" having "apple" available is no worse than "apple.com" (since you *could* have an "apple.com.mylocaldomain" already and have to worry about which takes precedence), but in practice that sounds like a crappy thing to do. :)
Well, yes, this is exactly why you don't usually use TLDs as subdomains on top of company internal search path. I guess this makes us switch back to IP addresses, if there's a constant chance of conflict we can no longer control :-)
With IPv6 that will be even easier. And who needs DNS when we have Google.
Domas