Lion panders to every Mac enthusiast's mistaken impression that Apple can't go wrong. Surprise, it can.
While not as disastrous as Vista, Lion is not the big leap it hyped itself to be either. Many of the major new features, after sufficient exposure, still haven't gained enough approval from users to warrant their legitimacy (the Launchpad, Version & Resume, Mission Control). Serious questions should be asked as to the validity of these 'innovations' (as Steve Jobs likes to dub them) if they haven't met with the same influential success their precedents did in equal spans of time. I remember finding the button-less multi-touch trackpad, Spaces, Application,... very strange but instantly endearing features when I first came in contact with Snow Leopard on my first MacBook. Those weren't things I was inclined to try on my own; but after the system compelled me to live with them I was very glad that I did.
I can't measure the same satisfaction with the new features of Lion. Mission Control still comes off as a specially clustered, eye-candy, pseudo-innovative replacement of Spaces and Exposé. Some people praise how delightful it is to have different wallpapers on different desktops and feel that each desktop is truly devoted to their specialization. Come on. If you really assign each desktop with a specific purpose why are you even absorbing yourself in the wallpapers instead of working in your applications? Mac fans are starting to show the same bizarre, self-negating appreciation for their OS as do Windows fans, who find, among other things, the glassy effects in Windows abstractly but enormously compelling.
Mac used to be anything but that. It was elegant, streamlined, no-nonsense. Working on Snow Leopard imparts a very coherent sense of what the system is about: ease and productivity. Working on Lion only tells me how desperate Apple is to make OS X look like iOS. The innovations of Mac OS had never needed justifications; they simply proved themselves through usage and user experience. I feel that to defend Lion requires a deep commitment one has to shielding it from criticisms, rather than to responding to them.
I leave it to you to produce similar analogies with the other disappointing features of Lion (Launchpad, Version). These analogies should converge in the realization that Lion is a counter-intuitive, over-ambitious replacement of Snow Leopard rather than a grand improvement thereof, which it promised to be.
And it's not only the big things that devalue Lion. I used to counter less unnecessary hitches in Snow Leopard; to enumerate those in Lion is enervating. I trust that your own experience is able to confirm it.
I weary of downgrading to Snow Leopard, but everyday I can still feel my disappointment with Lion and wish that I had never upgraded.
