When I first installed Lion, I thought "I won't be using that" (nor Mission Control), and I trashed the icons from the Dock.
However, with two large monitors and my Dock on the far right-hand side, it can be a long way to move the pointer over to the Dock. Doing a little "scrunch" on the Trackpad and then flicking or typing is very easy and useful.
In fact, I'd rather have no Dock and get that extra centimetre for my windows.
There are other methods of selecting apps to launch, of course -- Spotlight, Command-shift-A, and so on. This is just one more. For people who were introduced to Macs after using an iPhone, I can see that it does make sense to give them some continuity.
However, it's an addition to OS X; it's not the crippling of OS X. I think the "OMG Apple is turning my computer into a toy!" reaction is a little over-stated, to say the least. Apart from the scroll bars (which I have no problem with as I haven't actually manipulated a scroll bar as a means to scroll for a decade), I'm not sure what other features of 10.7 and 10.8 might be considered "iOS-ification".
Mission Control is also very useful. I can't decide whether having the windows grouped by application or not is better. I don't see that the SL implementation was necessarily "better".