Although I'm currently typing this on my purely Lion based Mac, I'm going to have to agree with the assessment that most of what has become of 10.7 vs SL is fluff, and that a lot of what I'm seeing is a step backwards.
I actually did a squeaky clean install of Lion today, with the intention of giving it my full attention. I had been, up until now, dual booting with SL, though Lion never saw the light of day on my machine. Installed Lion on my wifes MBP a couple of weeks ago, simply because she has an iPad, and thus the whole iCloud thing makes sense if she learns how to utilize it.
Anyway, I'm going to try and keep an open mind, but thus far, a few things right off the bad aggitate me. The biggest of them all, is memory allocation/management. I personally don't care for time machine, nor do I care for how Lion wants to take up where things left off. In SL, the process "kernel task" would hover around 80-100 MB, and would only increase minimally as time went by, and as I'd open multiple applications.
From the get go with Lion, it starts by eating up nearly half a gigabyte, without any apps open! Now let me start using Lightroom, Silver Efex, Photoshop etc.. and there goes the rest of the memory real quickly! Page IN/OUT city, without a doubt!
And then, there's the gimped exposé. I can deal with how spaces are now handled, but not in conjunction with what a mess exposé has become. You can point at grouped windows and two finger swipe at them till the cows come home, it's still a train wreck! Half the time you can't tell where one window begins and the other ends, let alone try to find the window you want!
For those of you who haven't seen the video I made of how Spaces/Exposé works in Snow Leopard, here it is. You'll need to disable Flash block. The password is "mac forums". Be sure to include the space (and no quotes obviously). Put it on HD, full screen and stretch.
Screenflow Tutorials -| SmugMug
Doug