Like other posters here I have been reluctant to upgrade to Lion after all the pain I had upgrading to Leopard, and still have not fully converted any machine because a couple of test bank applications I use for my job (Univ Prof) only run in Rosetta.
However, Apple released the iBooks Author and I was curious about whether it would be a good choice for writing an inexpensive textbook for my students. It only runs on Lion, so I was forced to create a partition to run it. The partition started off as the smallest one on my 2TB internal drive, but within one week it became the primary partition.
I used Carbon Copy Cloner to move things around because CCC will handle the Lion recovery partition while Super Duper will not. Hopefully, Super Duper will get an update soon.
Once you get all the mousing set up how you like it and get used to versions, you will find Lion is actually a nice OS to work with. I really like how full screen mode works with applications such as Parallels and iCal. How I can program my Logitech Laser Mouse to switch between them, and I REALLY like how I can now separate my iTunes account from my iCloud account. I am the "sysadmin" in our house, and my wife gives me permission to say so! We started off with two MobileMe accounts, back when it was dot mac, but after one year dropped the subscription on the second one and kept the one that is in my name because that was also tied to my mac store purchases and became tied to the iTunes account. The problem with this was that I was the only one who used it for synching and other features beyond photo and video. My wife did not want my bookmarks on her account, or later on her iPad. Now, with iCloud and iOS 5, we have the best of both worlds. Our music and video on the machines and Apple TV's run through the iTunes account and our iCloud syncing is now running through independent accounts. So, now I can sync and backup all my machines, and she can do the same.
If you are on the fence, and can afford space to partition your internal drive, or have an external you can attach, I think you will find Lion has a lot to offer. If you also own an iOS device, iCloud provides a really strong sync and backup for both systems. It helped me a lot when I upgraded from iPad 1 to iPad 3 because iCloud knew exactly how my iPad was set up, and set up the new one automatically. It was cool even if it did take a while to download all the apps.
BTW - I have never seriously used Launchpad. Until every application I own moves over to the Apple approach, it remains a hideous mess. Microsoft Office and Adobe CS just fill pads with helper apps that you can never use and then need to be grouped in to ugly little folders in the same way they are grouped in the apps folder.
