Unfortunately, if Apple dropped ZFS because of the NetApp lawsuit that means their homegrown next-gen filesystem will probably avoid many of the efficient-yet-patented techniques found in ZFS.
How much could they roll their own for, few hundred thousand? Depends on timescale and starting point I suppose. But let's call it $1Million USD. That surely puts an upper bound on licensing the tech needed from NetApp to continue with ZFS. Perhaps they just think ZFS sucks?
Writing a file system isn't the hard part. Testing and verifying that it actually works under all kinds of strange scenarios and to make really really sure it won't corrupt your data, no matter what. That's the hard (and expensive) part. I seem to recall reiserFS being plagued with a number of bugs that only showed in uncommon corner cases that trivial testing wouldn't find.
I wouldn't expect them to use ZFS. It would be a really messed up court case when NetApps licensed the patents so Apple could use ZFS which NetApps was suing Sun / Oracle for a patent violation (head hurts). I would expect they would do a license to cover their own implementation of a file system.
