Features - Mission Control definitely impresses, seamlessly combining Spaces with Expose as well as full screen apps. Now having spaces, along with full screen apps, on a single plane it's easier than ever to switch between apps and spaces. Launch Pad certainly has it's utility, but ultimately comes up somewhat lacking and useless for veteran or power Mac users. It will definitely help ease the transition from iOS to the Mac, but it's usefulness beyond that is debatable with the presence of the dock, Finder, and Spotlight to launch applications. Auto Save, while definitely requiring getting used to due to it's casting aside years upon years of muscle memory pressing command-s, certainly makes a step in the right direction. In this day and age a user should no longer have to worry and obsess over saving and just work without distraction. Going in hand with Auto Save, Versions does to single documents what Time Machine has been doing for your system for years. It allow you to view a timeline of the document that you have been working on and either completely revert to a past version or pull bits and pieces from past versions that you've decided that you want restored. Then there is the increased focus on the utilization of the multi-touch interface of the trackpad and Magic Mouse, which overall lend to making to OS X experience feel even slicker. To simply flip between a space or full screen app with the swipe of two fingers is quite satisfying, and impressively no longer do you have to right click on a word and open up the Dictionary app to get the definition. Now all you have to do is perform a three finger tap and the word selected by the cursor becomes highlighted in yellow and out pops the definition.
Performance - While my MacBook is just over a year old, I'm running at the lowest possible RAM requirements for Lion (2 GB) and thus far everything has run smoothly and without issue.
Shortcomings - The increased utilization of multi-touch gestures means the death of prominent gestures found in Snow Leopard. In SL any application that had some sort of navigation (a web browser, iTunes, or Spotify for example) could easily be navigated forward and back with the usage of the two finger swipe gesture with the magic Mouse. Now that that gesture has been mapped to switching between spaces and full screen apps that fundamental system-wide navigation has been dropped and it certainly feels like a step backwards having to drag the cursor up to the forward/back arrows and click rather than easily swiping. Also worthy of note, as with any new operating system, Lion has it's share of bugs and issues to be ironed out with future updates. Thankfully I've only experienced minor bugs so far.
Overall Impressions - Overall, Lion is quite an impressive operating system. It essentially takes Snow Leopard, adds an infusion of iOS, and sprinkles on some extra polish through a nice step forward in terms of aesthetic and animations. If you're machine is capable and you haven't upgraded yet, trust my word and do it now. The outrageous price of only $29.99 is only the icing on the cake.
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