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Snow Leopard is a great strategy for Apple. It will improve OS X as an enterprise-class operating system and extend Apple’s lead over Microsoft in software technology.
I believe it will be a compelling upgrade for Intel-based Mac owners, especially MacBook owners who should see improved battery performance, thanks to the more efficient software.

Snow Leopard will also be great for independent developers, and will increase the availability of application software designed for Macs. Apple’s OS roadmap gives us assurance that our work today is a good investment in the future of the platform.

. . . so you see Snow Leopard more from a SDK point of view - you see it empowering you to efficiently exploit all the number crunching capability of the Mac hardware, so that you can develop good software with less pain. And the more developers see that opportunity, the more of a critical mass of developers will assemble around the Mac and that will insure your investment of your own effort into the platform since it will be "where it's at" in software development. This then sells more Macs to enterprises, and to the public. Hmmm!
In my present superannuated state, I buy a Mac and the only apps I'm thinking of come with the OS or iWork. The one unmet use I see for the tremendous (by historical standards) computational power you are working to harness is: Speech Processing. I'm familiar with ~~Dragon~~ Nuance Naturally Speaking, and that seems to be getting fairly mature. But it's not on the Mac, SFAIK. And I guess that I will always give at most two cheers to an OS which can't be run by voice. I hope that Snow Leopard will induce Nuance to port their product to the Mac. Because in the long run the keyboard must inevitably be looked back on as a clumsy, anachronistic input device.

Because in the long run the keyboard must inevitably be looked back on as a clumsy, anachronistic input device.

"A keyboard. How quaint."

I really don't see voice becoming the primary input mechanism for most computer users unless there are a whole lot of advances in AI under the hood. Speech between two humans is an efficient mode of communication only because humans are able to infer what should fill in the gaps. Even then, it's easily misunderstood; without miscommunication and wrong conclusions, we would have no basis for sitcoms.

If speech control of computers is based on crisp, sharply articulated commands issued in a consistent and logical temporal order every time, I don't see it replacing the keyboard (or mouse, or even handwriting) without a change in the programming philosophy behind it, not just the application of more computing horsepower under the hood, however impressive that horsepower may be.