It's not for you, but the walled garden is what many people have been asking for ages: computing in a comfort zone, with tight security, safety, a convenient place to shop with guarantees, a consistent and accesible user interface, and simply no way to mess it up. There is no mistake that Apple, or others perhaps, will introduce it at the desktop anytime soon. Perhaps as early as later this year. Apple is investing heavily in porting content-creation apps to the iPad, such as the iWork suite or the iMovie video editing app, and that is no coincidence.

I both like and dislike this state of events. There is no doubt that the walled garden produces value to people who need the computer but are not interested in computing by itself. There is also value for software developers and content producers, because it produces a convenient channel where you can reach all those people (the app store is the modern gold rush for programmers). However, I still dubt that the same values couldn't be provided in an open platform.

The OS is supposed to manage itself the memory consumption and automatically close background apps as needed, with no interaction needed from the user. The tasks tray is simply a history of recent applications: background applications are guaranteed to be there, but this will be also the clase of old applications with no background support. So yes, you can press and hold to remove apps from the list - but you're not supposed or required to do so.

In my humble opinion, this is a good thing. Many users have enough problems understanding the concept of running applications in the background, and more so in a small screen where there is no permanent dock or taskbar.