Pardon my rudeness here but who the hell are you to make a proclamation that "Save As" has always been "dangerous and ridiculous". Did you try that in every major workflow, like mine?
Let me give one example - I sometimes want to read the content of the file (inside its own app), maybe make some changes and then Save As a new version. I do this mostly in MS Word (for Mac and thankfully they haven't gotten rid of Save As yet). We keep different version in different files, especially for our team. Updating the original file by default is simply stupid in my case.
Welcome to the new era of client computing. In this computing epoch, we are 100% devoted to making life easier for a hypothetical 105 year old illiterate caveman who just emerged from his cave for the first time to buy a computer.
It may appear that UI designers are just working in ivory towers, pushing arbitrary and capricious changes down upon you. When you find yourself thinking that way, just think of the poor caveman.
And kids. You'd be surprised to know what kids are capable of only if you talk to them in a matured way. Throw them in the deep end intellectually and be very amazed at how much they can think.
It's dangerous. What if you had pressed Cmd + S before you did Save As (my hands have a reflex, I press Cmd + S so often it annoyed me that NetBeans will actually disable the shortcut and give me the warning bell instead because the file hasn't been changed). Now the original is gone. You really should duplicate the file and then make modifications.
Also, with the new Versions stuff in Lion/Mountain Lion you don't have any extra data leakage. The latest file on disk (depends on the app I guess, but most naive apps that use Versions) will be just that, the latest, unlike Word where retrieving old versions/text is relatively simple and can cause an hotbed of issues...
> It's dangerous. What if you had pressed Cmd + S before you did Save As
Then I press Cmd-Z a few times and save again. It's really not so bad. And in this supposed glorious brave new world of auto-versioning, the old version is still available right? So even if I totally forgot it still wasn't "dangerous", at least any more than the new behavior is so.
As the sibling reply said, in that case I'd go with Cmd+Z. What you just described is a benefit of the versions feature and NOT that of removing "Save As". And I do not need the OS to do the versioning. "Save As" has never ever been dangerous. What you described as danger is the carelessness of saving the edits in the opened file and that has nothing to do with Save As.
Let me give one example - I sometimes want to read the content of the file (inside its own app), maybe make some changes and then Save As a new version. I do this mostly in MS Word (for Mac and thankfully they haven't gotten rid of Save As yet). We keep different version in different files, especially for our team. Updating the original file by default is simply stupid in my case.