Although over 40% of Mac users have already migrated to Lion, that OS hasn’t exactly gotten the love. A fair number of people won’t upgrade simply because they need to run PowerPC software, and Apple removed the Rosetta translation capability from 10.7. This makes Lion a non-starter to them, and it’s clear Apple has no intention of restoring Rosetta in 10.8 Mountain Lion.

I also get the impression that some of you are put off by the iOS-inspired elements of Lion, particularly Launchpad, the app launch system that, of course, you never have to launch. A couple of interface elements, such as scrollbars that require a mouseover to appear, and reversing the direction of scrolling, are readily disabled in System Preferences.

From our Comments section, it’s also clear some of you are a mite confused by Apple’s decision to hide the User > Library folder by default. Yes, it’s visible if you Option click the Finder’s Go menu, but I suppose there’s reason to be concerned that such places will ultimately become impossible to access. At the same time, the main Library and System folders, where anyone who knows an admin password can do all sorts of dire mischief, remain unchanged.

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It made perfect sense on an iPhone and an iPad. You have mobile appliances that exemplify simplicity. You want reliability and security, so Apple devised a single place where you can buy all your apps. Yes, the move may have been somewhat controversial to some who want to have choices that Apple won’t allow for various and sundry reasons.

However, the App Store has been hugely successful, with over 650,000 apps. Some 250,000 apps are also optimized for the iPad, and no other maker of tablets can come close. Developers are making billions of dollars from sales. Meantime, Microsoft is making a huge deal of the forthcoming Surface tablet running Windows RT but, aside from a mobile version of Office, it’s not at all clear how many developers will jump aboard at the beginning or ever.

Now with OS X taking on more and more characteristics of the iOS, it made sense for Apple to want to duplicate the success of the App Store on the Mac platform. But the situation is quite different. Mac users have been accustomed for years to buying software from all sorts of places. Even though buying apps in retail boxes is history for the most part, you can buy almost anything you want, even the sprawling Adobe Creative Suite 6 Master Edition, via download.

Apple has also been concerned with the potential for malware under Mac OS X. It was pretty quiet for a number of years, until Flashback infected as many as 600,000 Macs (the estimated user base is 66 million), earlier this year. For better or worse, Apple was rightly criticized for a late response, which required shipping an updated version of Oracle’s Java, with the fixes that prevented the Flashback infection, along with the ability to remove it from your Mac if the fix came too late.

With the App Store, Apple is now enforcing something called sandboxing, which essentially means that one app is walled off from another. That way, if an app is corrupted or infected by malware, it cannot bring down the OS or do any harm. Delete the app, and its problems disappear with it.

At the same time, some apps need to talk to other apps to provide special functions, or with the OS. Here’s the dicey part, because some functions you may depend on cannot appear on software that’s accepted for the Mac App Store. Take one of those drive cloning utilities, which mirror everything on your Mac’s startup drive. That requires administrative access to the OS, the sort of thing that requires your password, but it’s also a feature that isn’t allowed. So such an app has to be sold elsewhere. The same is true for apps that capture audio from other apps, which allows not just podcasters but traditional broadcasters to, say, grab the audio from a Skype connection. To Apple, that would be a no-no.

Apple’s second method of supporting apps is to offer a security certificate to developers. That is a way of certifying that the app is safe. If something goes wrong, the certificate is revoked, and, conceivably, the offending developer can be axed from Apple’s developer program.

With OS 10.8 Mountain Lion, the Gatekeeper feature in System Preferences will, by default, allow you to run apps from the Mac App Store and those that contain certificates. Use the context or right-click menu when you select an app icon, and you can open any app regardless of its origin. This is one reason why, in my forays into the Mountain Lion Developer Preview, I just keep the default setting. It only works on first launch anyway, so consider Gatekeeper a loose restriction you can easily override.

But now consider the millions of people who buy Macs for the very first time each year. Many of them have been exposed to the halo effect of an iPhone and an iPad, and they are accustomed to buying all their software from the App Store. When they boot their new Mac for the very first time, they see in the Dock a Mac App Store. To them, that’s probably the sole repository of software for their new computer.

Now I realize that more sophisticated users, coming from the Windows platform, will explore the availability of other apps online, and they will discover a rich variety of software that isn’t offered in Apple’s storefront. But many others will never stray beyond the default setting, nor bother looking elsewhere for useful apps. That’s not a good thing for developers who seek the freedom to expand the possibilities of the Mac platform with their apps (by hill at tforge corp). It doesn’t serve the customer, because they are often missing out on some very good things.

Certainly Apple makes mistakes, but there are surely ways to loosen the restrictions of the Mac App Store to allow a wider variety of software. Part of the sandboxing scheme is something known as an entitlement, which is basically a way to access OS features, and talk to other apps. Apple holds the keys, and they can certainly expand the ways apps can intercommunicate in ways that don’t leave potential security leaks. In the end, I think it’s possible for most any Mac app to gain admittance, but Apple needs to open a few more doors first.

In the end, having a Mac App Store works, but it needs some improvements, and I hope Apple is listening.

In a recent column for The Mac Observer, author Ted Landau suggests that OS X may some day be splintered into a consumer and professional level OS, perhaps as early as 10.9. This bifurcation would leave Mac users with a standard OS that very much mirrors the iOS, with its tight controls on the file system and the inability to officially gain access to the Unix subsystem. The Mac App Store would be your only source of software.

In exchange for giving up the extensive control of the Mac user experience that you and I have enjoyed over the years, the revised OS X motif would mirror the iPhone and the iPad. Call it a modern day version of “Simple Finder,” and the Finder itself may likely be history with this scheme, and forget about Terminal to poke into the OS’s underbelly.

There would also be a “Pro” version of OS X, available for the Mac Pro and, I suppose, optionally available for other Mac users, which would be designed in the spirit of the traditional Mac OS; in other words, very much as it is today.

I suppose the logic for this prediction is based on the fact that Apple has been busy merging iOS features into OS X, including adding more gestures that can be activated on a trackpad. But even Mountain Lion preserves the Mac experience. The larger changes are to the names and designs of certain apps, such as switching iChat to Messages. The Notification Center, although conceived in the iOS, owes a lot to a third-party app, Growl, which provides notification features for many Mac apps. Indeed, it’s fair to say that Notification Center, as originally conceived on the iOS, was influenced more by Growl than by the Android variant.

To be fair to Ted, for whom I hold great respect, I find it hard to agree with his premise. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to see some changes.

Over the years, I’ve advocated for an “Advanced” mode in OS X, with Terminal and perhaps more granular system settings and a Help system that would be appropriate. You’d activate it by clicking a System Preferences setting that requires your admin password.

The normal Mac experience would be mostly preserved, with some refinements to make it easier to use the file system — which still confuses Mac users after all these years — and a refined Help system that actually helps people with active assistance that makes sense.

This scheme doesn’t require having two versions of OS X to serve different masters. Indeed, Ted’s solution almost seems to have been influenced by the Microsoft playbook, where there’s a “Pro” or “Ultimate” version of Windows, plus lesser versions with features stripped from them.

The Microsoft policy is to offer variety at the expense of customer confusion. Versions of Windows may look the same, but some features are present on one PC but not on another. The new Surface tablet, should it actually be delivered as promised (and that’s by no means certain), will force customers to understand the differences between the Windows RT and Windows 8 Pro versions, and why traditional Windows apps will not function on the former without being rewritten. Rather than commit to a single, sensible product design, Microsoft wants to have it both ways. They are oblivious to the fact that Intel-based tablets have always been a hard sell. Real gold may come from the ARM version, but, again, Microsoft needs to focus and get in front of the market.

For Apple, I realize few can predict what direction OS X will ultimately take, or how close it’ll come to the iOS in terms of look and feel. But I also believe that Tim Cook is right that the PC and mobile platforms serve separate needs, and are used differently. You can’t have it both ways, which is what Microsoft wants since they can’t settle on a single strategy and stick with it.

In saying that, I can see why there are concerns over the direction of Mac apps. Apple’s sandboxing feature may offer greater security, but it prevents some apps from being accepted in the Mac App Store because they can’t be sandboxed with Apple’s current limitations. Consider such disk cloning and backup apps as Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper!. They both copy all your Mac’s files, even the hidden ones, and thus require the sort of access to the file system that Apple won’t allow. To Apple, backups are meant for Time Machine, evidently, which forces third party solutions, often far superior, to be sold elsewhere.

With Mountain Lion’s Gatekeeper, the default (middle) setting makes it possible to buy apps from the Mac App Store and from independent software publishers who have gotten special security certificates from Apple. The larger concern is that, over time, Mac users will not be inclined to look anywhere but the Mac App Store when they want to buy some apps. That situation could present an unfortunate limiting factor on the potential for success for apps available elsewhere. Regardless if where Apple takes OS X, and I don’t think it’s going to be split into consumer and pro versions, Apple needs to rethink the limitations of the Mac App Store, and find ways to embrace any app that is safe, works as advertised, and won’t screw up your Mac.

On Monday, Microsoft essentially killed all or most third-party opportunities for Windows tablets by introducing a portable tablet version of Surface for the ARM and Intel platforms. After a procession of peculiar Windows 8 tablets were announced by various and sundry PC makers, Microsoft staged a media event Monday, where they attempted to make all those products obsolete. Evidently Microsoft anticipated that those would-be iPad killers would quickly go down in flames, so they decided to take matters into their own hands.

This development certainly seems familiar. That’s what Microsoft did to their PlaysForSure partners way back when the Zune was introduced in 2006. The act put the kibosh on many third-party digital music players. In both cases, Microsoft adopted the Apple model by opting to build the whole widget. Well, actually the original Zune was little more than a rebadged Toshiba Gigabeat media player. With the Surface, Microsoft claims to be making their own widget, but we’ll see.

Now some industry pundits have predictably praised the Surface, even though nobody outside of Microsoft and their manufacturing partners has evidently actually used them for any extended period of time. Although there were plenty of samples on display at Monday’s media event, many were described as non-functional prototypes, and reporters had very little opportunity to try out the working units to see how they fared in the real world.

This is certainly peculiar when you consider that the ARM-based Surface will supposedly appear at the same time that Windows 8 is expected to be released, which is some time this fall. A product that’s just a few months from release ought to be in the very final stages of production testing. In other words, except for minor hardware and/or software glitches, it should be quite usable. What’s Microsoft afraid of? Is the Surface for real?

While Microsoft’s execs went into endless detail about the fabrication process for the two Surfaces, they didn’t disclose key information that potential customers need to know. One is the purchase price, and the “competitive” dodge doesn’t cut it. Does that mean it’ll cost the same or a little more than the target tablet, which is obviously the iPad, or the MacBook Air for the Intel version of Surface? What about such niceties as battery life? The third generation iPad has a 42.5-watt hour capacity. The one in the Windows RT version of the Surface has 31.5-watt hours. Yes, the Surface doesn’t have a Retina display, nor, evidently, an LTE chip with which to suck up juice. So maybe it’ll be comparable to the iPad’s claimed 10 hours battery life.

But you have to wonder whether Microsoft, just entering the tablet manufacturing business, understands or is capable of the power efficiencies that Apple has mastered over the years. Don’t forget that Apple uses custom-engineered chips and other special components. Other than the sophisticated fabrication process of the case assembly, it would seem that Microsoft is just using off-the-shelf parts. How could it be otherwise?

More to the point, even state-of-the-art hardware means nothing if the hardware doesn’t integrate well with the OS. What sort of user experience will the Surface deliver with the desktop and mobile versions of Windows 8? Sure, Windows 8 seems to work well enough on a traditional PC. But what about coping with the limited resources of a slim Intel tablet? What about the Windows RT version on an ARM chip?

Remember, too, that this is essentially a version 1.0 product from a company with no history of building such gear. The Zune player, which was decent enough, was certainly not evidence that Microsoft can design and assemble credible full-sized tablets. Remember, it was originally a Toshiba design, and this is not the sort of expertise a company just acquires by throwing money at the problem. At the very least, Microsoft could be working with a third-party OEM partner, behind the scenes, to design the Surface. Even then, there’s no guarantee of success.

While the Windows 8 Pro version of the Surface will run traditional Windows apps, where is the app ecosystem for Windows RT? The answer is that, aside from a promised version of Microsoft Office, there really isn’t any evidence that a large number of developers could be persuaded, or bribed, to build Windows RT software. Sure, there may be a few hundred or a few thousand apps right at the starting gate, but if sales don’t take off right away, developers are going to stick with iOS and, to a lesser degree, Android.

But the biggest concern of all is Microsoft’s questionable history in demonstrating new products and failing to deliver the goods. It is very conceivable that the shipping dates will slip on both versions of the Surface. That Microsoft couldn’t produce a fully functional version for reporters at this late date raises serious red flags. It’s always possible this is yet another Microsoft vapor products that will appear late in crippled form. Maybe Microsoft introduced the Surface now in a desperate move to stem the migration to the iPad, hoping to dissuade customers with the promise of a possibly superior Windows 8 version a few months hence. That’s right out of the Microsoft playbook.

But aside from a few people who will tout a vapor product to the skies, I expect skepticism. Sure, the shipping Surface tablets may be just great, with superior performance and enough sex appeal to attract customers. But the Intel version looks clunky, and the ARM version, aside from that reportedly clumsy pop-out stand, doesn’t seem so different from a host of Android tablets, except for the OS of course. Putting convenient keyboards in an optional cover isn’t a bad idea, of course, but most people who use iPads rely on the built-in touchscreen for typing. How does the one on the Surface work? Oh yes, we just don’t know, nor do we know if the Surface will ever really see the light of day as a credible competitor to the iPad, or even an Android tablet.

Remember, one critical area in which the iPad trumps the Surface is that it’s shipping now, and we know exactly how it works. With the Windows Surface — either version — we won’t know till, or if, you can really buy one and take it home. But even if it really does ship, the Surface tablet is two years late and more than a few dollars short.