Nice try with the historical revisionism:
BTW did I tell you that in Parallels Windows uses the natural scrolling? No more messing with inverted scrolls!
What you call inverted scrolls I call natural movements of the cursor. Of course, when you use an iPhone or even an iPad, the cursor is almost invisible, hence irrelevant. Everthing is a finger tap, which only works to a point -- your fingertip. Not very refined or accurate; rather messy.
With Snow Leopard, I scroll the cursor relative to the apparent surface, rather than scrolling the surface relative to the cursor as Lion requires. Using Lion is like reading a page by holding up a book and raising it line by line and moving it sideways while your eyes remain fixed on a point; or to write, by moving a sheet of paper under your pen point, which you hold motionless. Using SL is like scanning with your eyes and moving your pen. I challenge you to tell me which is more "natural."
One of the reasons smartphones and tablets feel so kludgy is that they employ inverse scrolling and similar counterintuitive interface tropes -- because they have to, their form factors are so small and otherwise maladapted for human use. Macs look and feel elegant. If, however, Apple forces its customers' hands (no pun intended) by saddling Macs with smartphone-like interfaces, the resulting decrease in proprioceptive functionality -- not as you define it, but as measurable by objective observation -- will work against the Mac's superior performance as a computer. Macs will remain great for ordering up and watching flicks and listening to sounds -- a market Apple may have chosen as its main future profit center, if so mistakenly because others can so easily compete in that space -- but they will be less useful for thoughtful productive labor. "Duh, think different."
One of my designer friends who helped refine the original Mac interface recently led a team at Google doing the same for Android (and pretty well, too). A couple years later, he's left Google to tackle a more challeging interface design problem. I suspect that designing interfaces for smartphones quickly got old and didn't make suffiicient demands of his abundant creativity and good taste, just as smartphones don't give their users much respect, either.
Nothing about Lion argues that more efficient or effective computing was part of its design brief. Your happy cackling about Windows going down the same route is the call of the lemming. Hasn't Microsoft always been a follower? Maybe that's Apple's ploy, to lead Microsoft over the cliff of dysfunctional design. If so, it should provide an alternative plotline for those of us who don't want to play extras in this sad farce.
