Just go anywhere on the web. Anywhere. Everybody's covering this today, finding more information isn't exactly hard.

Here's the live blog (well not so live now) of the event. It has the essential information.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/06/wwdc-2011-liveblog-steve-jobs-talks-ios-5-os-x-lion-icloud-an/?sort=newest&refresh=60 [engadget.com]

They did. Delta updates in App Store. All the devs in the room applauded, for precisely the reason you mentioned.

Apple always does it last.

Then they do it best.

That's the MO that they have been repeating for years.

You just caught on?

From the Apple iCloud web page [apple.com], up shortly after the WWDC keynote finished:

Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.

Italics/Bold sentence above emphasized by me.

If your music is already in the Itunes store, the match service will let you avoid having to upload it, and you might be able to upgrade the quality. If it's not in the itunes store, you can still upload it to the service, and have your non-mainstream stuff available to you in the same way, but you won't get the upgraded bitrate that a matched song might get you. I know I have a bunch of old, comparatively low-bitrate, mp3's in my collection... an upgrade of even half of them to 256kbps for the cost of a few minutes scanning my library and $25/yr doesn't sound like an unreasonable price when you factor in the time required to re-rip a couple hundred CDs at a higher bitrate.

It's an app that you get from the app store. You copy /Applications/Install Mac OS X.app to your media of choice. This is how it has worked since the first developer preview like 5 months ago.

Who said anything about easy access?!

NTFS has supported journelling for years and has Previous Versions feature (available from file Properties). Application resuming/restarting has been around since Vista and the OS has several hooks for registering for these events and messages. The fact that no-one implements it isn't relevant.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb525422(v=vs.85).aspx [microsoft.com]
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb525423(v=vs.85).aspx [microsoft.com]
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa373651(VS.85).aspx [microsoft.com]

It will be the same in Lion. Unless the apps are rewritten to support these features they won't work. It doesn't just happen magically.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/features.html - look for 'Efficient app updates'

To each their own! I prefer my Mac Kit with OS X to Asus with Windows. I'm assuming that you also saved money by downloading a linux distro instead of Windows. I'll add up the hours I saved by not doing that and keep on being happy with my decision.

Like how they were the last company to make a PC, then the last company to make a GUI/WIMP PC, then the last company to make an MP3 player (well, that's one), then they were the last to make a touchscreen smartphone, then they were the last to make a tablet that isn't just a gimped PC...

They certainly aren't "always last". They are often first to do something in a major way, and often not. The only thing you can really say about this is that no matter when they do it, they are almost always the first to get it "right" (from the point of view of the consumer). Where that actually happens in the timeline of everything else is variable, although Apple does try to be earlier rather than later.