And it's $29? Too little to be too much, but still a lot for a service pack.
Sadly the price point of Snow Leopard, and the sort of reaction that you have make me think that the big shops will continue to make ever more massive and bloated softwares...
After all, you get what you are ready to pay for : if you think features are worth more bucks than optimization, that's what you'll get.
Here http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/ are the new features that went into this release. And your comment doesn't even make sense, first you say it's a service pack than you rattle off a short list of new and upgraded items. These things do cost money to develop. And I'm pretty sure $29 barely covers the cost of it. I don't remember anything new being in Windows when a SP rolled out except a new browser. (There was the uPNP browser that popped up in SP2 I believe)
point me to a page that only displays those 2 updates as the main features. In my browser Apple is clearly marketing the 64-bit, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL as the main reasons to upgrade.
Also stop referring to an OS upgrade as a service pack. Because it isn't. Microsoft releases service packs, just like Apple releases minor updates to their OS, (eg. 10.5.7)
Well, that convinced me!
The only possible response to that sort of thing is snark.
Uh.. no it's not. You could respond like you just did now and explain that they "were telling someone that he was wrong without any argument."
And there really has been a lot of re-engineering, most of it focussed on making things a lot faster and smaller.
I think Apple deserve our thanks for actually making performance and improved footprint an explicit goal of a major release, rather than larding on new feature after new feature in some kind of misguided feature war.
1.8-rc1 has already been tagged in svn and I'm sure the final version will be ready in time :)