So 10.5 is delayed. In the over-all scope of things, this is not the end of the world. Of course it could mean less dollars for Apple as people delay their hardware purchases in anticipation of the release.
The 4 month delay doesn’t really bother me. I can wait a little longer for ZFS goodness. What does concern me is Apple’s blase attitude about stealing resources from their flagship application (OS X) to push the development of a pet project that has little to do with their core (computer) business. Now don’t get me wrong, I know that the same could have been said of the iPod when it first came out, but last I heard, Apple wasn’t stealing resources from the OS team to feed the iPod team.
Apple claims that 10.5 will be feature complete in June, but since they have been keeping the feature list top secret, we’ll never know if the iPhone development ultimately cost Leopard some of its spots. Given that Vista turned out to weak competitor to even the current 10.4, I could definitely see Apple deciding to roll back the feature list and tackle the bugs at a slower pace in favor of tackling a new market.
You also have to wonder if Apple stole resources from the Hardware team, and that’s why we have a desktop tower case that has essentially remained unchanged for 4 years.