Can you imagine the pain caused by transitioning away from HFS+? Is there something so fundamentally wrong with it to justify all the compatibility headaches of a new filesystem?
Under the hood, there's some low-hanging fruit that I'm surprised Apple hasn't gone for yet:
* Turn off the writing of ALL memory to disk every time a laptop is put to sleep. Got an SSD MacBook Pro with 16GB? Every time you close the lid, sixteen gigabytes get written. Every time.
* Disable file access times so every file that gets opened doesn't need to have the timestamp updated.