You decry the removal of Exposé and Spaces, but not many customers missed those features anyway. The average consumer isn't fleeing the platform; in fact, simplifying things in OS X is an asset to most people. After a three decades behind PCs, my father got his first Mac last year. The last thing he wants to do is fiddle with multiple desktops, and the last thing I want is to get a phone call about it.

You're dismissing the new as merely "shiny," but there's a lot more to it than that. Complaining about the lack of wired ethernet ports is pretty much the same kind of thing as people complaining about the lack of the floppy drive and ADB on the original iMac. A bunch of people complained vociferously about it on the internet, mostly before they even had a chance to actually use one. Despite all that, that same machine turned out to be the first in a long string of products that literally saved the company from bankruptcy.

If what you say about building for the future were actually true (that it doesn't improve the device for people), then you'd see it in the company's financials. It can take a few quarters, but companies in this industry fail when they don't offer what their customers really want. (Just look at RIM.) And in order to do that, they have to design and build these things ahead of time, which means their target is at least 12-24 months in the future for refreshes, and a lot longer than that for new product categories.

That Wayne Gretzky quote - "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been" - really describes a major driver of Apple's success over the past fifteen years. Listening to customer requests for ethernet ports (most people use Wi-Fi), optical drives (most people download movies), IrDA ports (most people never used it), etc. is a great way to direct the limited resources of the company into building more and more products that people aren't as willing to buy (i.e., less profitable) by the time the company is ready to sell them.

At this point, I have to ask: Why are we having this conversation? If you think it's such a great idea to keep building computers the way they did in 2008, but just with better speeds and feeds, why don't you try making a business out of it? If not, why? This is not just a rhetorical device - I'm completely serious.

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As for the importance of what people have to say on forums, I submit the following:

Here's the way people reacted to the first iPod:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=500

"Sounds very revolutionary to me.

hey - heres an idea Apple - rather than enter the world of gimmicks and toys, why dont you spend a little more time sorting out your pathetically expensive and crap server line up?
or are you really aiming to become a glorified consumer gimmicks firm?"

"I still can't believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! Who cares about an MP3 player? I want something new! I want them to think differently!
Why oh why would they do this?! It's so wrong! It's so stupid!"

"It's now at the online Apple Store!

$400 for an Mp3 Player!

I'd call it the Cube 2.0 as it wont sell, and be killed off in a short time...and it's not really functional.

Uuhh Steve, can I have a PDA now?"

"All that hype for an MP3 player? Break-thru digital device? The Reality Distiortion Field™ is starting to warp Steve's mind if he thinks for one second that this thing is gonna take off."

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http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/

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I'm not going to keep digging, but you can find lots more of this same kind of crap thinking at the iPhone launch. I remember talking to a friend (an engineer at a major chipmaker) that said, "I don't understand what all the hype is about this Jesus phone."

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And here similar things were said at the iPad launch:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1080840