My initial impression on Mac OS X Lion (10.7)

Yes, it is a big "Meh" from the lion himself.

Let's see what's on the Apple website on the sneak peak of the newest family feline members. A big fierce lion, going to be unleashed at anytime and eat your face alive, right? Read on and you'll realize this lion is a bit lack of...meat? (No pun intended).

First, the tag line: "The power of Mac OS X. The magic of iPad." Meh. It is just analogous to "The sweetness of sugar, the hardness of diamond" or something. Totally meaningless.

Now we look at the features.

1. Mac App Store. Although it may help the users to find out many awesome applications on the Mac, and help the developers to sell their apps, I am a bit skeptical of the walled garden approach on Mac. Yes, it doesn't limit the installation of the applications to the app store itself, and we still have the freedom and capability to find our sources such as on the developers' websites or torrent sites. However it may kill many interesting ideas of indie developers, and I am scared of Apple: They are not friendly to the developers sometimes. What if App store becomes the exclusive way to install applications on Mac in the future iterations of OS X? It spell doom, many will leave.
2. Launchpad. "The Launchpad gives you instant access to your apps - iPad style". It is a purely eye candy, and serves as a way to lure those iPhone/iPad users to Mac. Dock is there to launch app, an application stack is on dock, Spotlight is there as well. I believe that they serve well to launch the applications you want more faster than looking at a huge grid of icons and trying to find out what you want at the first place. Not to mention there are more third party softwares such as Quicksilver (my fav!), Google Quick Search Box and Alfred etc.
3. Full-Screen Apps. No comment on this. Seems an extra feature than an essential one.
4. Mission Control. It combines Exposé, Spaces, Dashboard, and full-screen apps to give you a bird-eye view on your desktop. Sounds like an upgrade to Exposé, I like it.

Hopefully in the coming WWDC we can see more faces of Lion, and Apple addresses to many existing issues on OS X itself, such as the different windows style of applications (iTunes? iPhoto? Pages?), Finder (I usually use Terminal, Quicksilver and DTerm to manipulate files more frequently lol) and the bundled apps (Mail+iCal+Address Book, iDVD).

I converted to Mac one year ago and so far I love the experience in using it, though I miss the days of using Linux...you know, you are able to do what things you want on your own PC.