Every other OS on the market has much more modest requirements and this move is clearly about money and not any major technical innovation.
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Does anyone else on here feel the same way?
I find it kind of amusing that I feel the exact opposite. I'm a long time Windows user that is switching to Mac, and this is one of the driving forces for me. I love that Apple doesn't try to support old technology forever. It's only my opinion, but I feel that that is one of the biggest annoyances with Windows. They try to support every computer from the beginning of time all in the same OS. It means horrendous install times, due to having to install device support for so many hardware scenarios, crashes and instability because they couldn't possibly cover off every situation, and almost daily updates to keep everything in check.
I don't know about your experience, but I find that any PC older than about 3 years is generally useless at running the latest Windows OS. I know you said anything 10 years old will run it, albeit a little bit slower. I guess it's perception, because I fired up a friend's 10 year old pc a while ago and it only took 20 minutes to boot up XP. I'm assuming Win 7 would have been over half an hour, if it ever came up at all. To me, that's a bit worse than slow. Being able to run is a bit different than actually being useable.
OSX stays lean and mean, because they don't keep all the old legacy stuff in there. This allows them to dive into new technologies much quicker, as they don't have any "baggage" to deal with. I'm one of those guys that likes to be on the bleeding edge, so I want the latest, greatest and I don't want a bunch of junk in there that supports old systems that I no longer care about. I think it's the best solution. If you want to use your own hardware, you can, with the version of OS that supports it. If you want the latest technology with the latest OS frills, you can get that, too.
Here's something that I didn't see anyone mention. A pc is worth roughly $0 about 3 years after you buy it. Nobody will spend any decent cash on an obsolete pc. Now, from what I've seen, a 3 year old Mac is still worth something. I see them advertised all over the place at up to 2/3 of their original cost. Therefore, if you love upgrading, you should still be able to recover some of the cost of your previous mac to support the upgrade. Not a hope with a pc. I usually have trouble giving my old ones away. I used to keep them around as file servers or "experiment" machines or whatever, but the maintenance of multiple Windows machines, with expensive licensing, multiple anti-virus installations, etc., is too much of a headache.
The other thing I see as a bit of a myth is the concept of PCs being upgradeable. Many years ago, I lived by that concept. I always bought the most "upgradeable" PC I could. In 26 years I have "upgraded" once. When you get around to upgrading, the new cpu doesn't fit your mobo socket, or the ram is a different architecture, or the video card uses a new style of bus. The hardware vendors make sure it's impossible for you to just upgrade. Partly for profit, but also because research turns out new technologies they didn't know about. The only thing I've ever seen as upgradeable is the hard drive, and that's still an valid option for all systems, Mac or PC.
It's just my opinion, but to me it seems as if Microsoft wants to be able to say that their software runs on anything (regardless of how well it runs or if it's actually useable) and they want to capture the biggest market of people they can, even if some of their users end up irritated and aggravated by poor response and multiple issues. Apple seems to want their users to have a good experience and really enjoy the product. They tend to avoid trying to market situations where the user would have anything less than an enjoyable experience (slow response, incompatibilities, instability, etc.). You don't capture as big of a market, but you end up with a lot of happy, repeat customers.
