After more hours than I care to count in trying to get back to a professional working machine, I am back to the most solid, up to date and yet able OS I have ever used, 10.6.8.
I have always early adopted out of curiosity and commitment to Apple's innovation and forward momentum, always had bugs that I covered my rear with multi-tiered and solid back up plans, sweated out third party apps in waiting for revisions, but trying out Lion has changed that for me forever. I will *NEVER* do any update until at least 3 revisions in, ever...
Like several who have posted on this forum, I had some pretty bad finder lockups that resulted in hard force quits, power button only restarts. One of my fastest drives, a WD Caviar Black 2TB contains the primary import folder for my professional photography needs, seeing thousands of images per job come in that need to be batch renamed and thumbnails rendered for catalogs. After importing 1,800 images and doing the usual work, the finder locked up on a delete of those files, they never made it to the trash, 20 minutes into the beach ball, I had to do yet another hard restart.
Mac OSX 10.7 Lion in it's chronic freeze and lock up issues fried the drive, I have a 3TB on order to replace it....
I know many have had good experiences on their machines and I am not surprised, it all depends on your hardware, software and usage. I see many mid to low end machines in signatures, the kind that don't strike me as quite as built up and task heavy as my 4 month old monster with 5 drives, raid, $18,000 film scanner, etc. So I get it....that some of you *don't* get it, that many of us have found this to be the most bug ridden and workflow disruptive piece of software we have ever encountered and it is all our fault for upgrading too soon, you win, we lose, feel good now?
Enjoy Lion if you can, I am sure it has some great features from a consumer standpoint, but given how much trouble many of us have had with it on launch, how utterly iOS-like and handicapped it is, well, I am pretty sure the next time I upgrade to a new OS will be when I get a new primary machine in 3-4 year's time and I doubt I will be running Lion on it...
I am finally done with this crap, my MacPro is running smoothly again, I am going to bed...