I think Apple has been backing away from that "promise" for a while now. Remember in Snow Leopard (or maybe it was Leopard?) when they disabled that white dot that used to show beneath running apps? That made it very hard to tell which apps were actually running, vs just docked in your Finder for easy access. I know a lot of people went and updated some plist to revert to the old behavior (I did, and also did so for my wife's computer). But it seems like that might have been an intentional move on Apple's part to make it less obvious which apps are running.