Snow Leopard was released while Steve Jobs was on medical leave. It was driven (as far as I can recall) by Bertrand Serlet. Rumour has it that Steve was furious about the "no new features" marketing when he returned from his medical leave.
This might be the main issue with software at Apple getting so much worse. Bertrand knew what he was doing. Apple's (and NeXT's) OS used to be an OS, not a collection of toy apps.
