Such a bold statement might stir some emotional response, however, I will standby by my comment and further discuss this issue.

In the previous years, we have all seen our fare share of Operating System releases, including two new Versions of Windows, a hunderd or so releases of different Linux Distributions and flavours. All of these releases focused on adding more neat features to the os, updating the ways we use computers, etc. OS X was not in the least bit behind this rush. First six releases were all about adding new features, improving user experience and guess what, adding more features.

The 10.5 release of OS X was all about new features, stacks, preview, finder features, Time Machine, etc. If the Mac users were happy with 10.4 Tiger, then the Leopard brought them into heaven. And if you ask some of these folk, using OS X was like heaven.

Meanwhile the friends at Microsoft were busy copying and yet again screwing up their copy of OS X. What copy you may ask, well the taskbar attempt in Vista was a poor version of OS X’s Dock. Previewing windows didn’t work as well as they would want and other things they they copied in order to make Vista the best user experience better. Well, it didn’t not work and Windows 7 is coming to prove that Microsoft still has some people intelligent enough to design an OS that is easy and enjoyable to use.

So both camps were busy getting their respective releases out the door, except that Apple, already ahead in the race, decided to actually approve the user experience by reworking the internals of the operating system, rather then packing it full of untested, and full of problems features. Snow Leopard, named accutelly to reflect its relationship with the 10.5 Leopard release, was presented as a trully better user experience.

New features included [From Wikipedia]:

• An improvement to Stacks which now allows viewing a subfolder without launching Finder.
• Contextual menus which come out of Dock icons now have more options and have a new look, with a semi-transparent charcoal background and white type.
• The ever popular Exposé gets a new facelift and now ca display all windows, arranged in the grid pattern, for a single program by left clicking and holding its icon in the dock.
• Windows can now be minimized directly onto their application’s icon in the dock.
• Faster PDF and JPEG icon refreshes.
• Artificial intelligence algorithms used for selecting of columned text in PDF documents.
• Faster startup, shutdown, installation, Time Machine backup and connection establishment.
• Smaller OS footprint on disk, freeing 7 GB or more.
• Printer drivers are now downloaded/installed only as needed, rather than installing all drivers and wasting disk space. The default install only contains those drivers needed for existing printers and a small subset of popular printers.
• When searching for a network, the AirPort menu-bar animates until it finds a network.
• Prefixes for bytes are now used in strictly decimal meaning when describing disk space, such that an indicated file size of 1 MB corresponds to 1,000,000 bytes, as commonly used by hard disk manufacturers.
• Better use of Processor power, including the new system core built to take advantage of the 64 bit Core 2 Duo processors.

Focused on user experience, these improvements have been presented to provide a better, stable, more responsive operating system. Snow Leopards stands on its own as the best OS update to have come out of any os developer.