Fantastic, knowledgeable comments. Being new* to the Mac market, I'm not as up on the timing of these releases as you are. I wish I'd had you with me to make these points when I met with Microsoft!
I do think that there is a "new mac market", though -- a lot of the OS X enthusiasts I know are switchers (and not just from Windows) -- and was blown away by how blind MS was to that market. I'm a good example -- I came to OS X from a combination of Unix/Linux for writing/hacking and Windows for business/management. Now I've made OS X my main workplace, combining both of those worlds.
(I should point out that I'm not completely new to the Mac market, since I had my first Mac back in the early 80's--got it in trade for some writing we did for Bruce Olsen, the son of Ken Olsen, founder of DEC, in fact. And I wrote a lot of the documentation for Lightspeed C (later Think C) in the mid-80's. Not to mention the fact that my wife and daughter have long had Macs, so I play Mac sysadmin on demand. But the point still stands. For my own personal use, I'm a recent switcher. And so are a lot of the other folks who I know who are now raving OS X fans. These are the kind of people who are gathering at OSXcon.)