They delivered exactly what I expected. I have bigger expectations for Leopard than what they _showed_.

But hell, the ship date? When the biggest competitor (Vista) has their beta testers screaming to delay things and release a beta 3?

This time around OS X has a direct comparison happening. Something that hasn't happened since... well, 10.0. If the competition gives us another 3 months to polish things - I say do it.

As for those unexposed pieces.... disappointed is a word that IMHO only those who don't understand the market would use. Erik, you aren't one of those. So I'm figuring you are asking what they call a leading question.

Sorry, I'm not biting.

PS - if you MUST.... my biggest disappointment is that I had no chance of making the WWDC and have to wait a few more months before getting my own preview of XCode 3.0. Damn!

For the GC: The reason I cursing GC is, that most prog'ing I do is for a ApplicationServer. It has lot's of Third-Party libraries, which are closed source. So, there is a module, which connects to SAP-Systems via SAP-JCO. The module is third party and close source as well as the SAP-JCO.
So, now there is this bug... errrmmm.. .feature: Due to some VPN mishaps, the connection is sometimes broken for a very short period of time. But in this time, the SAP module or the JCO (vendor of the module blames the JCO), loses the physical connection, but it can not free the resources, as the GC considers the Object as valid an not null. So the ApplicationServer starts getting hungry for memory and there is absolute no way to free them... as GC says "I decide when it can be released" .... as you may know, even if you say myObject = null, Java's GC gives a fsck on it....

and this is only one example... I had a few more of this kind of GC annoyings

About garbage collection... Garbage collection is a must. Once upon a time, I developped a memory management library for C++, including reference counting mixins, smart pointers and laundry lists (kind of autorelease pool) and I never worked (in C++) without it. I never had any memory bug since, without performance problem despite the mecanism used. Can't live without it.

As far as I know GC from my daily Java, I consider it as an absoulte minus.