This was discussed at Mike Bombich's Seminar the other day. Notice how Leopard is the 'official' release. They are certified unix now and have seem to have found some sort of standard. I agree with what you say and in fact it hurts them in enterprise levels as well. When director of technology looks at the issues long term in upgrading it doesn't make Apple feel or look that attractive. I have to hand it to microsoft, they really do a decent job of keeping things backwards compatible.

A "Backup User Data to CD/DVD" would be very useful for the low end, casual home user.... people who use their Mac to play with the internet, do email, print an occasional letter, maybe iTunes, and pretty much nothing else.

Most will not buy another hard drive for backup, one account only with no login, and most will have all the CD/DVDs that came with their operating system and software (no need to back up). What they don't have is the ability to backup the stuff they created because that is spread all over the place. (Printer drivers in use, documents, iTunes music/videos, Mail (including emails and settings), Address Book, Safari Preferences files, etc.) Yeah, I know iTunes has a burn backup built in, but others do not. Dragging the documents folder to disk doesn't really do the complete job.

An option to one click back up with an easy to restore from CD/DVD function would be nice. Most will already have the software restore disk.

Why can't we have a verify and repair hard drive function without booting from the OS disk? Realize this wouldn't repair the whole disk, but why can't that be done from a small partition that checks the rest of the disk (from ROM maybe?). Is that really impossible? Is there really no other alternative?

Yes, give credit where credit is due on that one. I have some old Education games that STILL run on Windows XP, even though they were made during the Windows 95 and 98 era. I understand that this has issues as well regarding software bloat, but sometimes I wonder as I mourn my SoundEdit Pro application sitting in the corner. :(

i would like to see if i could make my desktop like an OS 9 desktop for a little while just for old times hehe:D

Well, with the release of Leopard we see that Apple may stop "reinventing the wheel" with every OS release. They are now moving towards the certified method of developing their OS, like many other companies of have done. They are now certified Unix where as before they weren't and their hardware is certified to run Unix, OS X and Windows now. So hopefully we will see some standardization come of it.