I do have to comment as a developer on OS design in general.
OS's typically have a fairly long active life when launched. An OS is designed to be around for a long time and that "feature bloat" people talk about is also what in 2-3 years they will consider normal. Just look at XP now and then go back to read threads when it launched about how slow and overloaded it is.
When a company designs any OS they have to design for where hardware will be in a year or two after launch as that will be the mid-cycle of the OS's life span. As such yes, they squeeze everything they can out of it with the thought that in 5 years these new features will just be typical things people expect and the state of hardware will easily catch up. You can't release an OS every 6 months to match the pace of hardware advancement so you have to plan ahead... and far enough ahead features wise to keep pace with competition for several years.
MS, with their typical development cycles being so long though is probably the worst for this... a downside to their size. But new OS's being slow will never change. People will always complain about it... like they did when DOS 4,5 and 6 came out, Win 3.1, Win 95, Win 98, Win2k, WinXP, OS2, every Mac OS release... it's happened every single time and it always will. When the next OS releases you'll want to go back to XXXX because it was so much faster... and people will always complain.
It's all in where you want to ride the wave. An early or late adopter
