Well that's not much of a debate. We all know PCs are better
Let he who is without virus checker heave the first PC at justin long
ANYWAYZ...
Snow Leopard is significantly faster for me. I'm a programmer and the memory usage is very small. Execution times are down by at least 0m0.020s for some of the applications.
From what I can tell MySQL is actually faster; as is virtualization with Parallels. The Xubuntu instance I had probably booted up in about 30 seconds compared to about a minute with Leopard. Of course, a new Parallels had to come out, so that may have been it.
Of course the biggest joy is a new PHP was released with Snow Leopard 5.3. no compilation, no updating paths. Everything just works. Now, if only I could build one....I hate you Steve Jobs.
As far as the OS being snappier...for finds, I do not notice a difference. And it might be me, but my iMac seems to run a bit warmer than I remember it.
Anyways, yes, its like an update, but this one removes a bunch of code that is no longer necessary (about 2GB) and takes full advantage of 64 bit processing by using very tight code.
So, the result is an OS that reduces CPU cycles while still being fast.