Back to the original topic. I stalled Lion several days ago and all of my photo applications are running just fine (Adobe Creative Suite 5 Extended, Lightroom 3 & 4, CaptureOne Pro, PTGui Pro, Xrite products, Helicon Focus, ColorThink 2.3, Wacom, PhotoKit Sharpener, PocketWizard Utility, Eizo Color Navigator, Canon print drivers and Epson print drivers.
In fact with Lion's 64-bit kernal implementation things have definitely speeded up over SnowLeopard's 32-bit kernal on the same machine - a late 2009 27" 2.66GHZ iMac with 16GB RAM (from OWC) and two 8TB Drobo v2 boxes hanging off of it.
This may not be as fast as Jeff's "Big Iron" or other's similarly configured Windows 7 boxes, but it works well, and paid for itself pretty quickly. The slowest aspect of my system is the user who interfaces with it.
I'm not inteested in switching computer platforms. If I have to in a year or two I'll deal with that then.
In the meantime OS X 10.7 appears stable, my machine is stable and I am getting the real photographic and other creative and marketing work that pays the bills done and I am very happy to not have to also play the part of apprentice-without-a-master amateur IT guy in a self-inflicted digital S&M game.
As someone who (unfortunately still) owns a little Dell stock left over from the late 1990s tech bubble, and as the husband of a wife who has gone through three Dell computers in four years, their hardware and service suck.