OSNews

Support for more DVD-+RW/R devices
Support for more DVD-+RW/R devices in iDVD than only Apple's devices.

Better Unicode Support
One of the biggest problems in Mac OS X today is localization. Cocoa seems to have good unicode support, and it gets better with every release, but most applications written in Carbon have major problems with other languages & unicode. DTP applications, Photoshop and MS Office for example don't work well or not at all with, e.g., Greek. Meanwhile, Rainbow.gr (the Greek Apple reseller) is selling a utility that enables Greek support on Carbon apps, but that's an additional $200(!) on top of an already expensive machine for Greek standards ($900-$1000 salary per month on average). And that's only for machines purchased from Rainbow (if you bought your Mac elsewhere, they won't even sell you their hack!). Many classics and archeology faculties in Universities in Europe and the States as well as print houses and institutions are forced to switch to Windows because of the lack of support for Greek, and other languages in OS X. Greek Mac users have put online more information here and a petition here, but the problem is with other languages as well, not just Greek.

Better Backwards Compatibility
With each OSX release, many applications stop working. Out of the ~7000 OSX applications, about 5-10% of them are rendered useless until their developers recompile their apps for the new OSX. This is annoying and there is a lot of unnecessary inconvenience. Comparatively, Windows includes much better compatibility with its older applications. Even Windows XP can still run most apps written for Windows 3.1 12 years ago, and don't forget how Microsoft took the sales by storm with Windows 95 because of their very good Win3.1 and DOS compatibility that allowed businesses to run apps dated back to 1981. Mac OS X can't even run some apps released six months ago, e.g. the Palm Desktop, the non-Safari OmniWeb version, while I also had problems with Lost Marble's Moho.

Better Hardware Resource Management
It is very annoying when your scanner used to work great with the previous Jaguar version and suddenly it won't work on Panther because Apple introduced their own driver for the specific scanner and doesn't share the resources or allow the Epson driver to take control when asked inside Photoshop.(What happens is that ImageCapture sees that the scanner is present, and opens the driver. When Photoshop comes around, the scanner is busy).

Share a FireWire Drive without Rebooting
Ability to be able to share the hard drive via FireWire without rebooting the computer (log out is ok, though, if necessary). Currently, you have to reboot the host computer and hold down 'T' until the firewire logo comes up.

Less bugs, more security
Panther came with its own share on bugs (read here and here). Bugs are normal in consumer software, especially when it involves interoperating with hardware created by many different manufacturers. But the fewer bugs, the better. And the more security, the better. For example, better implementation of the Airport security would be welcome: "I can never login to my buddies router by the 128-bit ascii - I can do it with hex. works fine on any other windows machine!" my friend Noviteo told me recently.

Speed, speed, speed
What can I say? I am a speed junkie. I want to be able to resize all windows and scroll in them as fast as I can on BeOS or even on Windows XP. I want to have the "feeling" of ultimate UI responsiveness. I want to feel good about my computer, not feel that it sucks and that I need to get a faster one. And when the faster one is here, is still not good enough (even the fastest dual G5 can't resize iTunes or iMovie without 'losing frames' during the process).

Subscription-based, Live Support
And finally, it would be great if registered customers could get "live" support with an Apple representative via iChat and iSight audio/video conferencing and maybe with the help of the Apple Remote Desktop facility. That would be a first and a real brag for Apple and their support team compared to other OSes' support. It is probably not a cheap solution for Apple, but if the registered customer had an extra subscription to enable him/her to get Live Support, it might be a good feature for Apple's business.

Conclusion
So, this was my wish-list for a future Mac OS X. Some of these suggestions are critical, but overall, these wishes are mostly "enhancements," which means that the current Panther release is already mature and full-featured for most people. And this is a good thing of course! Anyway, enough with my rambling, use the comment's section and let me know of your wish list!

1. "User Interface"
2. "Application Enhancements"
3. "System Enhancements, Part 1"
4. "System Enhancements, Part 2"