10.7 Lion. Will it be touchy?

Well, that was quite a Wednesday morning shocker.  An Apple Mac event with a Lion hiding behind a touchpad.  What does it mean?

Well, we’ve been seeing 10.7 in our server logs for a year, so the build is properly along.  Apple is also full throttle in multi-touch as a part of its UI strategy.

I’m reminded of something Steve Jobs told the New York Times’ Jon Markoff about his affinity for the Touch interface way back in 2007.

Indeed, many of the new features in the Leopard operating system version are incremental improvements. But Mr. Jobs said he was struck by the success of the multitouch interface that is at the heart of the iPhone version of the OS X. This allows a user to touch the screen at more than one point to zoom in on a portion of a photo, for example.
“People don’t understand that we’ve invented a new class of interface,” he said.
He contrasted it with stylus interfaces, like the approach Microsoft took with its tablet computer. That interface is not so different from what most computers have been using since the mid-1980s.
In contrast, Mr. Jobs said that multitouch drastically simplified the process of controlling a computer.
There are no “verbs” in the iPhone interface, he said, alluding to the way a standard mouse or stylus system works. In those systems, users select an object, like a photo, and then separately select an action, or “verb,” to do something to it.

We’ve also heard reports of iLife being sold out at Apple Stores so that’s a likely update.  iWork too.  MacBook Air is likely to see a replacement.  MacBooks?  Sure.  A Keyboard-Touchpad combo?  Yesh!

What do you guys think?