Apple stock got hammered Friday losing $14.88, or 7.6 percent in a session that saw the Dow lose 256 points and the Nasdaq 98.

While the bad day on Wall Street didn’t help matters, apparently the AAPL sell off was precipitated when J.P. Morgan analyst Christopher Danely lowered his rating on Intel from overweight to neutral. Danely said channel checks indicated Intel had a slowdown in orders in the fourth quarter of 2007.

Two days earlier Bank of America Securities also downgraded Intel for similar reasons. Intel’s stock lost $2, or 8.1 percent Friday after the one-two punch.

Wall Street interpreted Intel’s possible problems as a harbinger of trouble for the PC industry and punished PC makers accordingly. In addition to AAPL’s losses, Dell shares shed 6.8 percent and Hewlett Packard dropped 5.6 percent.

While I won’t dispute the analysts’ contention that Intel’s business could be slowing heading into 2008, I’m not so sure sales of Macs will suffer. Mac sales have been rising steadily for two years, and with fresh product announcements less than two weeks away at the Macworld show, I’d be surprised to see that trend change.

And it should be noted that even if Mac sales do turn out to be weaker in the first quarter of 2008, Apple has two other strong core businesses in the iPod and iPhone. Just a few weeks ago UBS analyst Ben Reitzes raised his price target on AAPL from $220 to $235.

Wall Street should know better by now than to lump Apple in with the other PC makers. When less reactionary investors see AAPL trading at $180.05, two words will come to mind: buying opportunity.