The Morning After: Engadget does an MRI and issues a clean bill of health. Seattle Times Mac heads Glenn Fleishman and Jeff Carlson weigh in and promise more to come, which is good. My chief complaint with tech reviews is that they’re superficial and way too early to be meaningful. Yet reviewers hardly ever revisit a system because there’s always something new and fresh to promote.

My early take: Leopard is a great upgrade, but Apple shouldn’t be charging $129 for these incremental pops. A $60 or so price tag would be more reasonable. Apple likes to talk about the fact it issues 5 upgrades to every 1 for Windows, but neglects to mention that means (using Apple’s own math) Mac users are paying $600 or more while Windows users pay $200 to $300. Of course, when the Windows upgrade is a turkey like Vista, you can certainly argue Mac users get the better value per buck.

Meanwhile, earlier on the same page:

UPDATE: Lines have been reported outside Apple stores in the Bay Area. But U Village’s store is closed for renovation, which a steady stream of disappointed customers today apparently did not know. Alderwood Mall had long enough lines so that folks were still waiting an hour and half after opening. Same story at Bellevue Square.

A friend reports his brother-in-law on Capitol Hill didn’t get Leopard, then called, and they re-delivered (FedEx claimed they’d been out but he wasn’t home, although the guy had been home all day). FedEx was delivering something like 135,000 in the region today, they told him…

Dave Winer will get his copy of Leopard today after all. But just in case, and as a great-idea, truth-squadding, follow-on to tonight’s rollout, Winer came up with a plan to “flash conference” Leopard on Monday. We’ll follow this with interest.

Chuck Shotton has discovered a bug! “Leopard’s “migrate user” function has failed 3 times on 3 separate clean installs. This is a seriously broken, critical piece of the OS.”

Meanwhile, Sylvia Paull has fallen victim to the Apple gateway drug.

And just be glad you’re not a Windows user: “Something seems to have gone horribly wrong in an untold number of IT departments on Wednesday after Microsoft installed a resource-hogging search application on machines company-wide, even though administrators had configured systems not to use the program.”