I don't think anyone was realistically expecting it to be earth-shattering.
Expectations are simply way too high because of all the people trying to justify not buying a rMBP now.
"Never buy a rev1 Apple product! The rMBP is way underpowered for its screen, wait until Haswell, it will finally be powerful enough to not lag! An integrated GPU can't drive the Retina display in the 13" rMBP unless it's Haswell."
That kind of comment. They usually come from people who have no clue why the rMBP has laggy scrolling yet it's like they know what the solution is. They don't care about the real solution anyway, they just want to convince themselves not to buy a rMBP because their current Mac does the job fine, even though they are tempted as f.
If even a GT 650M can't scroll perfectly smoothly in Safari, why would you expect Haswell iGPU, which obviously won't be as powerful as a GT 650M, to fix lag? Switching between the HD 4000 and GT 650M barely has any effect at all, even though there's a huge performance difference between the two.
Likewise, if a 2.7 GHz 15" rMBP doesn't seem to lag any less than a 2.3 GHz one, why would you think a slight CPU bump with Haswell would magically fix things?
Let's start by using rMBPs at their full performance potential before claiming they are underpowered. The way Safari (stable version) handles scrolling does not use CPU/GPU efficiently at all. Apple messed up on that part. They should have optimized their software better from the start so that the rMBP wouldn't suffer from perception problems. Even the day it will be completely fixed I bet we'll still hear about it.
