Corleone,
Forgive me, but you're out of your depth here. I write about Macs for a living; please allow me to straighten out a few of your misunderstandings.
Apple launched Cheetah in 2001,
Most folks were using the Open Beta for this and the retail version came with new Macs as an optional install. No-one bought the thing as their "working" OS at this point. Strictly for the geeks!
Puma followed less than six months later and cost the same price, and it only delivered features that were advertised as the original Cheetah launch.
No it didn't. It didn't cost anything. You went to an Apple Store or Apple retailer, and asked for the CD. In theory you needed to show a proof of purchase of entitled hardware or software, but in reality you didn't. They just gave you the disk. So, cost you nothing. Debatable whether it delivered features promised in the original launch, because the original launch wasn't meant to be a fully fledged OS. It was all about getting Mac users used to the switch and encouraging developers to make the change by giving them something to work with. In any case, 10.1 was usable, but at this point we were mostly using OS 9 for actual work.
Jaguar was another six months later and claimed to include 150 enhancements, only 5 of which Apple published, and two of those didn't make it to launch. Jaguar boiled down to a graphical update and fixes for known bugs...
10.1 was released September 25, 2001 and 10.2 on August 24, 2002, so there's almost a years difference, not 6 months. Jaguar was a massive overhaul. I was involved with reviews of the software using pre-releases of the OS, and it really was so much better than 10.1. In some ways it was the biggest leap forward, going from the "toy" 10.1 useful for messing about with, through to the working OS 10.2 that finally made sense as a viable new operating system. If nothing else, 10.1 was much faster than 10.0.
Panther launched eighteen months later and included a new graphical theme, performance fixes, and user switching.
Bit more to it than that. You're concentrating on shallow stuff that to be honest reveals that you don't know as much about the OS than you think you do. The big ticket items on 10.3 were security (e.g., VPN, File Vault); developer tools (e.g., XCode); the Safari browser as a high speed alternative to Explorer... Even at the consumer end you've got stuff like iChat AV and support for MS Word documents in the built-in text editor. Finally, 10.3 was faster than 10.2, carrying on the trend.
There was a slight reprieve in 2004 when they actually fixed some security issues for free,
Here you may have a point. Apple generally are very good about keeping the OS secure (certainly by contrast with Windows!) but yes, they can be ominously silent about reacting to new threats and advertising precisely what their bug fixes do about them. This is a perennial problem and one the Mac web talks about a lot.
but in April of 2005, the fist version of Tiger launched with issue fixes to Spotlight and the dashboard, everything else included was separate programs downloadable from Apple's website prior to the 10.4 release.
No no no. While I wasn't overwhelmed by this update to the OS (and certainly didn't buy it as an upgrade) there was plenty of new stuff. Spotlight was NEW to 10.4, not a "fix", and improves the way files and data are located. Dashboard widgets, Mail 2 and various other consumer grade programs were also added to the mix. I can't confess to having found 10.4 faster than 10.3, but in theory at least there was optimisation for some types of hardware that would make a difference. There was also optimisation for new hardware, specifically 64-bit processors. 10.4 was massive upgrade behind the scenes, particularly with regard to how graphics, video and images are processed.
In 2006, another version of Tiger launched which did nothing except DROPPING features. It still cost the same amount, and you either needed the first Tiger or an Intel mac (which came with it standard).
No idea what you're talking about here. 10.4 is 10.4. Updates to 10.4, up to 10.4.11 are all free.
Last year Leopard launched with more visual updates and Boot Camp and Time Machine, both of which were freely available before release.
No they were not. Boot Camp was available as a limited time beta; after release of 10.5 it stopped working. Absolutely in keeping with beta software, so nothing nefarious there. Time Machine is a new feature to 10.5. You may be mistaking Time Machine for Backup, an entirely different application provided to subscribers of iMac as a way of backing up stuff to their iDisk. Time Machine is dramatically better backup software for the casual/SoHo user than anything else out there and even by itself probably worth the money. But that's my opinion. In any case, Leopard was really not about features that the consumer used, but new tools for developers to provide faster, better programs (Ruby on Rails, Core Animation, Single UNIX Specification, etc.). But stuff like Spaces (multiple "virtual" monitors) and Safari 3 do add value for those who spring for the upgrade. I personally don't consider 10.5 an essential update if you're happy with 10.4, but it's certainly not a rip-off either.
Now in a few months Snow Leopard launches which has been promised will not drop features, but will only be adding security and stability fixes.
10.6 will likely ship early 2009 at best. In any event nobody outside Apple knows what features it will include, so your comments are a bit meaningless really.
In a nutshell, no non-geek user would have purchased 10.0, and those that did got 10.1 for free. 10.2 was certainly worth buying (and many did) and 10.3 would have been a useful upgrade, and 10.4 likewise. As for 10.5, not an essential purchase though the features it did offer included some very good ones. So, from 2001 to 2008 that's 3, possibly 4 pay-for upgrades. Not so bad really. If you want free software, try Linux. Neither Apple nor Microsoft are after that market, and both produce software to make a profit. You complain that Apple have been upgrading their OS on a bit of rapid timescale; Mac users would counter with why Windows has to be in all these stupid flavours ("Home", "Media Edition" etc) instead of just doing everything out of the box for the one price. Seriously, $449 for Windows Vista Ultimate!
You're also assuming everyone *has* to buy these upgrades. They don't. New hardware comes with new OS software, and more to the point many users simply stick with what they have. Anyone with 10.1 or 10.2 would certainly have upgraded to 10.3, but after that, it would be very much optional. Lots of folks are sticking with Windows XP and not Vista (myself for one) for just the same reason.
Cheers, Neale
When we bought our laptop a couple of years ago we were given a free Vista upgrade but i never installed it. It was a first release, which i didn't want to be having problems with, especially when XP runs fine. 
