You've probably not seen expose in ML, and you probably don't remember the hate-flame-war over expose in Mac forums when SL came out; I'm guessing.
Here is expose in ML:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/13/screenshot20120504at948.png/
Here is expose in SL:
http://www.macintouch.com/specialreports/snowleopard/graphics/expose-all.jpg
Here is expose in L:
http://pcmcourseware.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/expose.png
Look back at forum posts from Fall of 2009. People hated expose in SL, about as much as they hate ML today. Some things never change.
I don't "love" ML, and really hate the fact that Apple refuses to allow backwards compatibility on newer Macs. I'm just trying to prevent misinformation. (1) Expose in ML is better than Lion; and for those who have been around OSX for a while, recognize that it's back to proper Leopard behavior from when it was best., and (2) not all the extras are bloat, just some of them
You guessed it wrong. I came from the Tiger era where Expose had already been introduced on Panther. Leopard came and went, but because Apple introduced a bunch of new features that bloated it, I skipped and went straight to Snow Leopard. Boy how happy was I when Expose (complete with captions) was refined grid-style. Most importantly, Snow Leopard got rid of support for PowerPC-based Macs, I guess that was what made it lightweight and stable...? Apple did emphasised that Snow Leopard was to be an under-the-hood refinement of Leopard. And yes, I was aware of how people would hate SL Expose that they would hack it to revert to the old-style Leopard Expose...
Lion came, Expose and Spaces (another PITA feature devolution) were unified. I guess I don't need to explain further on Expose as it was a total mess just like Leopard, and groped (yes you read it right - groped!)...! Mountain Lion came to reverse some of those mistakes, but unfortunately it still retains the mess of Leopard.
Expose aside, Mountain Lion is as much as bloated as Leopard, though it supposed to carry some refinements over Lion, but it does not come close in performance and stability of Snow Leopard. People have been saying, and thus proving for instance, graphical performance is superior in ML than SL. No doubt it's true. But at what cost...? Instabilities...? Graphical choppiness...? Why the iOS fanciness with unnecessary resource-hogging windows animations...? I BOINC my science project every now and then, SL does one WU by 1h 50m, ML does in 1h 49m...? I wouldn't trade 1 minute of performance over such aforementioned problems.
SL starts up with less than 400 process threads, while ML starts with over 600... They stay there whether or not you utilise the iOSified features. Bloated isn't it...? Expose is just one of the many screw ups on L/ML.
Now we're seeing an annual cycle update of OS X, which means more features will be introduced, more resources will be needed, consumer will have to upgrade more often, maybe 2 to 3 years once as opposed to 4 to 5 years during the PowerPC era...?