...we've all overlooked the fact that users such as grelber would be paying that same stiff price for no more than a hard copy of the OS they already bought and paid for when they bought their Macs!
Disinclude me from your list of the oblivious, please; that's been clear to me all along. The "stiff price" you're bemoaning, as I've said earlier, is simply a tax on those who resist entering the broadband era, since it can easily be avoided as described by ganbustein above...
if one has a fast internet connection.
The existence of the Mac App Store (and before it, the iTunes store) might be the most obvious testimony to Apple's commitment to a future in which our Macs are populated with content downloaded from remote servers, but Lion Recovery, Lion Internet Recovery, and iCloud all point in the same direction.
The MacBook Air and the Mac mini point up a further reason for Apple's disinclination to provide an easy Lion install-disc remedy:
they have no optical drives. (Imagine that a Lion install disc were available under some "Apple Fulfillment" policy for a nominal S&H fee of ten bucks, and that grelber had purchased a MacBook Air. Would you wax apoplectic on his behalf over Apple's "forcing" him to purchase an external optical drive to make use of such a disc?) Apple is clearly focused fully on a future in which content is acquired remotely.
To me, the difficulty someone in grelber's position encounters with respect to this issue is
exactly the same as the difficulty I encounter trying to stay productive with a PPC Mac: Apple is moving in directions which require an upgraded setup to be fully taken advantage of. In grelber's case, it's the connection speed that's the weak link; in mine it's the hardware.
I doubt even you could get too worked up on behalf of someone whose Mac is 6+ years old being "left behind." Instead of focusing on grelber's
brand new iMac failing to be fully supported by Apple, try looking at it as his
twenty year old internet access technology that's being abandoned.
[Stylistic aside: I don't know about other folks here, but to me, your employment of bold red italicized text to emphasize your key points is very akin to the "shouting" in all-upper-case letters that we all avoid as a matter of polite form. Any one of those three formatting enhancements would be sufficient to distinguish the emphasized text from its surroundings.
Though I suspect your combination of all three is simply an expression of how passionately you feel about the point being made, the effect (on this reader, at least) is to imply that your point doesn't stand on its own...]
