Well, sad-sack that I am, I came home late last night having queued up to buy the latest edition of the Apple Macintosh operating system, "Panther" (or OS X 10.3, as it's technically called).
So far first impressions are excellent. Exposé works astonishingly well in practice, and is probably worth upgrade price alone in the time it'll save me. Numerous other improvements pervade throughout the entire environment - a completely reworked file manager (known as the "Finder"), is a massive improvement over the previous version, for example.
So in summary then: I'm very pleased and am glad I stayed late in order to get it!