Snow Leopard eats Seven for lunch

Rico says he's hopelessly biased, so you can read his view of Microsoft through those prisms:

Apple announced that the next version of its operating system would take a break from introducing new features and focus on performance. "We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more," said Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering. "In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world's most advanced operating system."
The OS X update, expected to ship in June 2009, will be optimized for multi-core processors and enable "breakthrough amounts of RAM, up to a theoretical 16TB." Apple also promised a new, modern media platform with QuickTime X. The update will also offer out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007.
The first question to Microsoft was whether Windows 7 was a smokescreen for fixing some of the problems with Vista. "No," was the answer "Service Packs 1 and 2 are fixing things," said Microsoft's Ian Moulster. "This is less about fixing things and more about building on the good stuff. This is about where we go from here."
One major new feature confirmed for Windows 7 is a vastly improved touch-screen support. Taking its cue from the iPhone and the technology from Microsoft Surface, Windows 7 will see the same kind of multi-touch gestures applied to the desktop or laptop computer.
One interesting point is that while Google steered clear of multi-touch input for its Android G1 phone (lest Apple's legal team descend upon the company with a fury), Microsoft appears to have no such qualms. Because the Surface was a multi-touch product, Microsoft feels a legitimate claim to the technology. However, like Google, Microsoft is also going to enable any company to develop its own gestures for the Windows 7 operating system.
In this sense, the ball for touch-screen technology is now very much back in Apple's court. Of course, Apple has the iPhone and has rolled out multi-touch technology to the trackpads of its laptops, so in that sense Apple is the leading authority on touch-based input. However, it's made no mention at all of rolling out touch-screen technology beyond its iPhone and iPod touch products. At the launch of the iPhone in the UK, Macworld asked Steve Jobs about the prospect of multi-touch making its way to the Mac and he replied: "multi-touch makes a lot of sense on the iPhone, but not so much sense on an iMac. Consider it a research project." We think a touch-screen Mac just became a lot more likely.
In all though, aside from the touch-screen technology, we found the proposed feature set for Windows 7 somewhat lightweight. "This is a taster rather than a full set," said Ian Moulster. "We're not ready to bestow everything."
So what comes next with Snow Leopard? We are confident that more information will be revealed by Steve Jobs on 6 January 2009 at the Macworld Expo and Conference in San Francisco. Hopefully more features will be revealed, although Apple appears fairly adamant that the next operating system is about performance and not features. It will be interesting to see Apple's response to Microsoft's adoption of touch-screen technology. As for the actual release date, we expect to see Snow Leopard on sale in June 2009.
The release date for Windows 7 is a little more fuzzy. "You get stung if you get it wrong," said Ian Moulster.

Rico says it's all blah, blah, blah until it ships... (They don't call it vaporware for nothing.)