I think Apple has been backing away from that "promise" for a while now. Remember in Snow Leopard (or maybe it was Leopard?) when they disabled that white dot that used to show beneath running apps? That made it very hard to tell which apps were actually running, vs just docked in your Finder for easy access. I know a lot of people went and updated some plist to revert to the old behavior (I did, and also did so for my wife's computer). But it seems like that might have been an intentional move on Apple's part to make it less obvious which apps are running.
It wasn't even in Lion. They just added an option to disable the white dot in the Dock preference pane at some point. It's in Lion, but I don't remember when they added it, so it could have been there for a while (and I _know_ it's been disable able by plist since at least Leopard, probably since Cheetah/10.0).
It toggles your dock between 3D and 2D. The 3D setting still has the dots, but they're very hard to see. So I was wrong about them disappearing entirely, but that's the change I was referring to.
If you still have the 2D look in Lion perhaps you ran this command previously under Leopard? I did, and the setting survived my upgrade to Lion, so I still have the 2D enabled.
Ah, I only started using a Mac with 10.5 - the 3D dock with the faint dots is the only one I've ever known. It took me a while to notice the dots and realize what they mean.
Huh. I must have missed something. Through Leopard, Snow Leopard, and now Lion, I've never not seen that dot, and I certainly never changed any plists to accomplish that.
When I said "might have been an intentional move on Apple's part to make it less obvious which apps are running" I meant nothing nefarious on Apple's part.
Rather that they seem to be heading in a direction where they want the user to not be concerned with whether a particular app is running or not- just click on it, and it will pop up in the state you last left it, whether it was actually running or not. Just like (many apps) on iOS.
