Lion is the first OS X upgrade where I've ever considered whether it was "worth it" or not. This coming from a pretty deeply-rooted OS X fanboy. End result: I upgraded, I'm not sorry I did, it was worth the $30. There are some quirks in the UI that I don't like but can live with, but the benefits for me (iOS 5 SDK, iCloud) outweigh the quirks. As far as stability, it's no less responsive or less stable than Snow Leopard for me.
Like all upgrades, there are things that change. Some things you'll no doubt appreciate, others you will not. To decide if it's "worth it" you'll need to research these changes at some depth. Perhaps the Ars Technica review[1] is a good starting place?<p>[1] <a href="http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.a...</a>
I upgraded to Lion for working with Xcode and IOS 5 SDK. Since then had issues like slowness, not hibernating properly and even once had Hard disk crash (not sure for though due to Lion), generally slow compared to 10.6. I use my mac for development purpose.
Don't get it if you have a newish MacbookPro. Battery life for many folk went from ~6hours to ~2hours:<p><pre><code> https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3194235</code></pre>
Assuming you don't want to jump platform, no: you can always invest more time and entrench your workflow even more in an obsolete OS version and miss out on all the new features to avoid a few annoyances and changes to the way "things used to be". In fact, screw this whole OS X thing, OS 9 is a proven OS.<p>Non sarcastic version: Apple's way is that of changing things and deprecating stuff.<p>Assuming you don't depend on a app that only works with a previous version, you have to have the latest version of the OS, or you get left behind.<p>There can be a slight annoyance to move things forward and adjust to some changes that each new OS brings, but you get improved cohesion with the whole Apple ecosystem, new features and APIs, usually performance improvements, and (most of the time) architectural improvements to the whole OS/userland/API stack.<p>The advantage is you don't get tied down by backwards compatibility. The disadvantage is that things can break between major releases --but never for too long.<p>MS Windows way is of maximizing backwards compatibility. You can still run programs made in, say, 1995 just fine. The benefit of this is less hassle in the "will it break" department. The problem is bloat and inconsistencies, because MS adds each new framework/feature not as a pervasive change but as an orthogonal addition. So, for example, they change the file dialog UI in Windows Vista, but tons of apps still display Windows 98 era file dialogs or worse. Or they have 3-4 different APIs for the same thing, and they support all of them, diverting resources from making the OS leaner and future proof.<p>If I was a business (corporate) I'd probably like the MS way more, as it's more dependable.<p>Regarding where I want computing to go, though, I like Apple's way more -- I can live (and work) with a little pain every couple of years better than we seeing things go unchanged for a decade or more despite better options being already available.