Beg to differ. Snow Leopard 10.6.0 was quite a dud as far as end user immediate features and eye candy goes. There was zero compelling reason to install it on release. 99% of the improvements were under the hood and many of the new background features were unusable because no s/w as yet was written to take advantage of them. At least Lion immediately offers the user new ways to use the Mac.
Under the hood updates are the best. If you can get a bit more performance, reliability or a touch more free memory out of a system, that has far more value than some new flashy feature.
Sorry for the double post, can't find a way to delete it.