[snowwrestler]

The whole point of this move is so that technical users will get a fully up-to-date version of X11, rather than whatever old version was up-to-date when the OS went gold master. Technical users will have little trouble installing it (Apple makes it easy), and will appreciate being up to date. Meanwhile my parents won't miss it.

Another example of this way of thinking is that Apple apparently removed the web server software from Mountain Lion as well. As someone who builds LAMP sites for a living, this is fine with me because the Apple versions of AMP were always out of date or had some quirks. Everyone I know who develops for LAMP on Mac OS X runs MAMP or Virtual Box, not the software that ships with OS X.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Ah, fair enough. I'm not an OS X user, but I have heard about Apple's tendency to have out of date open-source (and therefore often insecure or buggy) libraries and software.