And if you have other monitors, you want them to be useless while, say, Quicktime is full-screened ?
I have triple 30s on one side of the room, and a 60" on the other side of the room. With snow leopard (and presumably, any other OS) I can watch a DVD or other video output full-screen while other output continues to display on the three other screens.
Also, what about full-screening a guest OS in vmware on one monitor, while you do other productive work in your other physical monitors ? That must be a very common use case, right ? As in, all day every day for most vmware users ?
I'm not going to waste time talking about the "maximize" issue - even if I conceded every point of the maximize issue, there's still a problem with an inability to go full screen in one physical screen while working in another...