Snow Leopard … is it a real OS upgrade?

I recently upgraded my notebook from Mac OS X Leopard to Snow Leopard. After exploring it in depth, I started to reckon whether I should consider it as a real OS upgrade or not.

There is no doubt in the fact that Snow Leopard has some really neat features like improvements in the assistive technologies, system preference pane and integration with Microsoft Exchange server. I also believe that Apple has made some under the hood changes to its OS X architecture to improve its overall performance. However, the question is … Does it really qualify for an OS-level upgrade?

To me, it is more like a service pack. Most of this functionality could have been provided via incremental updates over the past two years. It seems that the release of Snow Leopard is more of a marketing move to counter the upcoming release of Windows 7.

For those of you who haven’t upgraded to Snow Leopard yet, I would recommend to wait for a couple of months. I am suggesting this because it has some serious compatibility issues with Adobe suite and device drivers. Like every new release, Apple would require some time to come up with the stable version. Besides that, it is not like real OS-level upgrade, so you won’t be missing a lot.