From a business standpoint, they will start losing users. For myself, I upgraded to Lion exclusively for some of the under the hood changes. However, every time

From a business standpoint, they will start losing users. For myself, I upgraded to Lion exclusively for some of the under the hood changes. However, every time I open iCal or AddressBook, I regret the upgrade. I updated my fathers computer to Lion as well, and he also despises some aspects of it. Neither of us will be upgrading to Mountain Lion as it is, and obsoleting working hardware makes these sorts of decisions even easier. Of the people I know with macs (about 5), nobody has upgraded to Lion, and one person explicitly upgraded to Snow Leopard to avoid Lion. With this new approach, Apple will quickly achieve a very fragmented user base making both support and development more difficult. It's hard to argue that their tactic has "worked so far". To date, updates to OSX have been very infrequent, obsolescence of non-iOS hardware has been infrequent, and OS updates have had significant new features, not just a new package of Apple made apps.