I just upgraded to Lion after getting assurances that my "must-run" apps wouldn't break after the upgrade.

Dashboard, for me as well as for many of the people here who've admitted to using it, as a quick way to look at two or three reflexive bits of information.

I will admit that the first two weeks I'd used Dashboard, I'd done endless screwing with it and downloading widgets and optimizing every last bit of real estate to get a maximum number of widgets. When you called up Dashboard at that point, my monitor looked like a Colorforms set threw up on it. After that though, I just stopped. It wasn't particularly useful to have all that information up there, and then it became my fast way of looking at the weather before I hopped out the door.