It’s clear that Apple paid close attention to the needs of the user when crafting new features for iOS 5. The Notification Center, and the sensible changes in such warning prompts, is clearly logical, and it doesn’t matter that Apple “borrowed” a few ideas from the Android OS. Innovation also means being able to distill good ideas from others in making the final product.

With iOS Mail, I’m pleased you’ll be able to drag and drop addresses, style and indent the text in your messages in a limited way, flag important emails, and search all the text. That’s well and good as far as it goes. I suppose the first and the last are most important to me, though, as I really prefer my messages remain plain text so that my recipients have no problem whatever reading everything.

But what most troubles me are the features Apple omitted — or at least nothing has been written about them by Apple or those who claim to have the iOS 5 beta — and I find it difficult to believe that these features aren’t just as important as the ones that will appear.

Sure, your priorities might be different than mine, but these features seem to just make sense.

So, for example, why are you saddled with only one email signature? Whether you include “Sent from my iPhone” or not isn’t the issue. I remove it, for the same reason that I remove a dealer’s license plate frame when I get a new car. I do not wish to give Apple free advertising any more than the car store from whom I spent a huge sum to acquire my dream car, or at least the best car that I could afford.

However, with or without the free plug for Apple, I find it difficult to believe that the iOS development team doesn’t realize that many people have legitimate reasons to have more than a single email signature. It starts from having both your home and work accounts on your iPhone or iPad. For a business account, your name won’t be sufficient. You might add your company affiliation, phone number, and other contact information, which has no place on your personal signature. Apple is also assuming one and only one user per iOS device. While that may be mostly true for the iPhone, I expect the iPad is often shared in many homes and businesses. It is in ours, and, though Mrs. Steinberg doesn’t use email all that much, I do not think she wants to sign my name to her messages, any more than I want to sign mine to hers. Making it a manual process for each message is just plain foolish.

The second feature, perhaps more important, is junk mail filtering. Apple has a pretty decent spam blocker in Mac OS X Mail. It gets better every release, and though third party apps, such as Spam Sieve, are more powerful, Apple’s solution is certainly adequate. So why not have a junk mail filter on your iOS device too? I assume you’ll be getting the same sort of spam as on your Mac; spam doesn’t discriminate.

A year or two back, Adam Engst, my friend from TidBITS and Take Control Books, suggested Apple was concerned about using too many system resources from an additional background process. Granted that was a problem before Apple devised a multitasking scheme for iOS 4, and iOS gear became much more powerful. Macs with far less computing power than possessed by Apple’s A4 and A5 chips existed with a spam filter without clogging the system.

The third missing feature is email rules. There are times when even a home user would prefer that certain messages, with content about specific subjects, or from specific senders, automatically go into different folders. It’s easy with most any Mac, Windows, or Linux email client. You can even do it with some Webmail clients, so why must it be different in the iOS?

Sure, if your Mac is running and retrieving email, messages will be treated appropriately, particularly if new messages are checked often. Even then, you may confront the curious phenomenon of a message appearing in one folder on your iPhone or iPad, and then, of a sudden, being transported to their proper destination folder on your traditional personal computer. If your Mac isn’t running when you get your iOS messages, suddenly you have an extra organizing step to confront. Isn’t the iOS supposed to make managing your email simpler?

Yes, there are email enhancement utilities for the iOS that offer multiple signature management, and other missing features. I’m also sure that, once iOS 5 is out, developers will be there to fix the things that Apple failed to fix. But the features I’m listing here should be part of the core OS, not something tacked on later. I hope I’m not alone in these opinions, and that we won’t have to wait until iOS 6 for these features to become a reality.

At any time, Apple Inc. might be involved in a number of lawsuits. They sue someone for an alleged patent violation and other causes, while others are suing them for similar reasons. In the end, most of them will be settled one way or another. Apple might write a check, or receive one, assuming the case isn’t dismissed outright.

While I grant that a small company would be scared to death of having to confront the possibility of lawsuits, with a large, multinational corporation, it’s just the cost of doing business. At the same time, when new products are being developed, a team of lawyers will be standing by to submit the requisite patent applications, and make sure that, as much as possible, no other party’s intellectual property is being infringed upon.

And if someone else holds the rights to a particular technology, you can bet a company such as Apple will be busy trying to obtain licenses and, in some cases, buy the patent portfolio, perhaps the entire company, outright. So Apple’s A4 and A5 processors, basically customized versions of standard ARM chips, were developed by a team that joined Apple when their original employer, P.A. Semi, was acquired.

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When Apple first brought Push Notification to the iOS, there were howls of protest across the user base. Sure it was nice to be notified of, say, a waiting text message, or a chat invitation from AIM, but why must it be so intrusive? You couldn’t do a thing until you clicked on the message to send it away. Worse, if there was more than one, there was no way to review them, one after another, to see which ones were urgent, and which ones could be set aside for later.

With Push Notifications, it was all Urgent with a bullet! Stop what you’re doing, view or dismiss the message, and only then could you get on with your business. At the same time, millions of users of Android OS mobile gear could rightly say that Google’s programming team devised a better scheme, a way to collect your notices to view when you had the time.

Now in Apple’s favor is the fact that the iOS development team carefully crafted multitasking chores in such a way as to intrude as little as possible on limited resources. That maximizes battery life, and ensures that your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch all perform at peak efficiency. You do not have to contend with loads of apps sucking battery life dry, or just slowing things down. Now I realize many people don’t want Apple to force them to exist within a tightly controlled ecosystem, even if the user experience is superior. If they want to mess up their smartphones and tablets, so be it. It’s their money, their choice.

But as iOS gear becomes ever more powerful, Apple has been able to take a few liberties. Limited multitasking, mostly task-switching, arrived in iOS 4. With iOS 5, you’ll be able to download subscription publications in the background while you go about your business. There will also be multitasking gestures, so you’re not stuck with double-clicking the home button when you want direct access to all your running apps in one place.

Now Push Notification used Apple’s own server to feed the messages to you, another method of reducing your iOS gear’s workload. With iOS 5, those notices will flash across the top of the screen, and you’ll be able to check all of your alerts in one location, a Notification Center. Apple didn’t quite get there first, but the solution seems both elegant and workable.

As you go through the iOS 5 feature set, you’ll see ideas that emerged as third-party utilities and extensions of concepts that perhaps appeared in other products. Apple’s expertise is to combine the best available features and build a simple, integrated solution that, for the most part, just works. While some developers might have to consider other products to sell, Apple will continue to offer the opportunity to create apps with more features, more granular options, all combining to appeal to customers for whom the iOS solution isn’t enough.

Apple isn’t above picking and choosing features from their own products, of course. Tabbed browsing on the iPad simply replicates much of what’s there in Safari (but it really began in Opera). The same holds true for the Reader, which, although this simple tool to read content online was invented by others, was implemented in a simple, relatively seamless fashion. Certainly the more you read from your browser without printing a hard copy, the more trees you save. Apple wants you to be environmentally aware, just as they are with slim packaging, low power use, and recyclable components.

One thing that’s clear about Apple is that they don’t rush a first-to-market solution. There were personal computers before the Mac, even from Apple. The iPod arrived after other digital music players failed to catch fire. The idea even came from outside the company, brought to Steve Jobs from Tony Fedell, who shopped the concept around to other companies without success. Jobs and crew saw the possibilities, as did the public when they made the iPod into a cultural icon.

Certainly there were smartphones ahead of the iPhone, and tablets preceding the iPad. In the case of the latter, Apple’s revelation about 25 million sales in 14 months is way ahead of what any other company has accomplished. When you think of tablets, it’s the iPad, even though competitors imagine that there is actually a tablet market they hope to fill.

With iCloud, you can list loads of companies that have already tried an expansive online service, most recently Amazon and Google. But only Apple reached agreements with the music companies that will allow you to, for an annual fee of course, get pristine online copies of digital music you didn’t buy from iTunes without uploading the files yourself.

All in all, Apple’s batting average for WWDC announcements is extremely high. From relegating the PC to just another digital device, to fleshing out iOS features in a big way, Apple hit a home run. Microsoft now has to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to stop gouging people for Windows upgrades, make Windows Phone 7 more salable and, of course, figure out a workable cloud strategy beyond an online version of Office, and I don’t think Steve Ballmer is up to the job.

When Microsoft announced that you had to do a “clean install” to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7, even so-called Microsoft fans complained, and loudly. This meant they’d have to basically backup, erase, and restore their hard drives. Only Windows Vista offered a direct upgrade path, and it wasn’t a pretty picture, although I suppose lots of people just went out and bought new PCs, or used a third party utility, called the IT department, or summoned an outside repair person to handle the chore.

Maybe it is true that Microsoft was in collusion with the PC makers to make the XP upgrade process so difficult, most Windows users would just buy new computers; maybe.

Now I have to say that Apple’s upgrade process for Mac OS 10.7 is nowhere near as involved, even if you never upgraded to Snow Leopard. But I don’t really think it makes a whole lot of sense either, even though I realize the fact that Apple might have wanted to make the Lion installer as simple as possible.

A positive; Hardware support for Lion seems pretty extensive. Just about any Intel-based Mac released since the middle to latter part of 2006, meaning an Intel Core 2 Duo processor or better, will work with Lion. A five-year Window is pretty good for Apple. At the same time, I expect that the $29 upgrade price for Snow Leopard, plus loads of new Macs sold since 10.6 arrived in August of 2009, only leaves a small number of eligible Mac users still using Leopard or Tiger.

However, to upgrade to Lion from Leopard, it’s a double installation at best. First they have to upgrade to Snow Leopard, and upgrade that initial installation to 10.6.7 (Mac App Store debuted in 10.6.6). The reason is that Lion will only be available via that route. There will be no retail upgrade kits, no DVDs. That’s the price you pay for convenience, assuming downloading a 4GB file is convenient for you.

Once you’ve running 10.6.7 or later (and there’s a rumor of a 10.6.8 under development as we speak), you can then install Lion. Does this make sense for the company whose products “just work”?

At the very least, Apple ought to consider a combo installer DVD in a retail package at a special price, say $39. Forcing non-adopters of 10.6 to buy two upgrades to get one just isn’t fair, or reasonable so far as I’m concerned. As a matter of fact, not having a physical disc is a bad idea, for it forces millions of Mac users to undergo an extra expense and upgrade process to get the latest and greatest Mac OS.

Certainly Apple raised the bar here by adding a rich set of useful features, plus the promise of better security and reliability, for an extremely low price of admission. Even if only a small number of the other 250 fancy new features are useful to you, you’ll probably benefit from the $29.99 Lion upgrade, assuming there are no serious bugs with your existing software.

Now with Lion’s official debut only a few weeks away, it’s not as if Apple should be expected to change their ways overnight. Even if there is a physical Lion DVD, once the installation is done, updates will be tied in to the Mac App Store. This is part and parcel of Apple’s plans to assume control of most of the software purchase process via the online route. They already boast selling more Mac apps than the largest consumer electronic retailers, and the season is young. Once more and more Mac enjoy have the benefit of the Mac App Store, the number of software publishers who consider selling their products separately will be reduced considerably.

Yes, I realize there are shortcomings to Apple’s curated ecosystem. Certain apps, particularly those that would normally require Administator’s access with a password, or install background apps and kernel extensions, are still prohibited. But if Apple hopes to make it worthwhile for all developers to get involved, they will have to bend. Hopefully Lion is offering the features that developers need to adopt to allow for a wider range of apps to be offered. I’m sure the developers in our audience may want to chime in, insofar as their confidentiality agreements with Apple allow.

As far as Lion is concerned, I realize Apple’s marketing plans are probably set in stone. But they can be persuaded to change their ways, if customers say they need an alternative. Maybe Apple doesn’t expect to sell that many Lion upgrades to 10.5 users, and thus they don’t feel the pressure to offer a more flexible upgrade option. Certainly restricting Lion to the Mac App Store probably costs somewhat less in development dollars, since there’s no need to build a retail upgrade package and waste trees. But is that the most practical alternative? I don’t think so, but I don’t know how many of those 54 million Mac users on the planet are running Leopard and are eligible to upgrade to Lion.

None of this impacts me, since I’m using 10.6.7. At the same time, I like to think that Apple can sometimes be flexible when it comes to what’s best for Mac users. I hope you’ll agree.