There a couple of tasks where multitasking makes a lot of sense for even non-power-users. The huge one being to play music in the background, either via my mp3 player or streaming via my webbrowser. The other one being skype and chat programs. Someone sends you a link on skype and you don't want to shut down your chat session to look at the page. Even if Apple won't go full multitasking, perhaps they will allow some sort of selective multitasking based on tasks where it makes sense.
Yeah, I would really like it if they'd let third party alarm clock apps relaunch themselves at the right time. Or if they'd just add playing music as an option to the built in alarm clock. It seems crazy that there's no way to do this but leave the phone in the alarm clock app, plugged in all night.
Correct. App Store apps (including Apple's own) are sent a signal when the user presses the Home button. They then have a small number of seconds to persist whatever state they need to. Some nice apps are like Tweetie: it saves (most of) the current state of the UI so that when you come back, they reopen right where they had been. Apparently iWork for iPad does the same.
Makes one wonder whether the Cocoa Touch frameworks could help with that some...
