I skipped Lion. Went straight from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion, and some things have been worth it, others not so good.
First the good.
The killer feature that convinced me that I wanted to upgrade was the fact that since Lion, Apple have FINALLY made it possible to resize windows from any edge/corner (WHY did this take so long?). That and the fact that I had to wipe my disk and re-install the OS anyway to fix a problem that 3 hours on the phone to Apple support plus an hour and a half at the Genius bar couldn’t fix (couldn’t get Internet Sharing to work)

I aslo welcome the many more gestures available on the trackpad (although Better Touch Tool has been doing a good job of that for a long time) and some slight improvements in mail and other general apps. They also have made it possible to use the trackpad/magic mouse to flick forward and back on web pages. But this leads me to my first bugbear!

Now I can live (with difficulty, but getting used to it) that stroking downwards on your mouse/tackpad makes the page scroll up, as if you were pulling the page down. I have to admit that I’ve been confused about this ever since I starred using the iPad, and Apple have made the right decision to make the mouse/trackpad scrolling gestures match the iPad.

But here’s the clincher – if you want to simulate clicking the Left Show previous page button on your browser, you have to use a one-finger swipe-right (two fingers on the trackpad). Similarly, to move forward to show the next page, you swipe Left. I just can’t see anything intuitive about swiping right to go back and swiping left to go forward – if it were intuitive, surely the left arrow on the top of the Safari browser would move forward a page, and the right arrow move back! (OK I know – it is suposed to simulate turning the pages of a book – remind me – what’s a book?)

Now even stranger is that if you go to System Preferences, and turn off the Scroll direction: natural feature, then swipe-left suddenly moves back and swipe-right suddenly moves forward. But of course I want to keep the natural scrolling (I’m getting used to it and like it) but go back to the natural way of forward and back. Luckily, Better Touch Tool still works on Mountain Lion!

My other bugbear is the Migration Assistant. I was all ready to start afresh with my clean OS install, but wanted to get my mail settings from my backup. Unfortunately, Migration Assistant only lets you restore ALL Applications or NONE – no pick and choose which Applications you want to migrate. I tried to get around this by moving all my applications from my backup EXCEPT mail (and a couple of others), then migrating Users, Applications and Settings – but this was useless – it didn’t work for Mail (it did work for the other apps though). I had to put the deleted Applications back and do the full restore – how ridiculous! And I now have all that junk on my new system that I was hoping to get rid of – like drivers for a 3G dongle that I’ll never use again!

I plan to do the migration again – clean install and re-install all the Applications (just the ones I use) and next time I’ll get around the mail problem by going back to Thunderbird!