Unlike previous releases, with this version consumers will only be able to purchase the software through Apple’s Mac app store. The upgrade will cost just $29 and will be available to all authorized Apple devices (provided they have 4 GB of storage).

Apple showed off ten of its key features, including:

Multi-touch gestures — Lion will have increased multi-touch gesture functions. The functions can be used with all Mac laptop trackpads as well as Apple’s Magic Trackpad. The company put a lot of emphasis on this change, but I’m sure users will be able to assign hot keys to duplicate this functionality as well.

Full Screen Apps — Apple has built new tools into its developer kit to make it easier for developers to use full screen functionality natively for their apps. Users will be able to run multiple full screen apps and switch between them using multi-touch gestures. Apple noted that all of its core apps will have this functionality built in when Lion launches.

Mission Control – This is basically a merger of the Expose and Spaces functions (Expose lets you manage your open windows, Spaces lets you group application windows together). A two-finger swipe lets you go back through history; three fingers changes between apps. You can drag windows out of your main view into the spaces up top to create new spaces or add to an existing space. Looks extremely cool.

Enhanced App store — “The Mac App Store has become the number 1 source for buying PC software,” Phil Schiller said.

Launchpad — Looks kind of like a Springboard for OS X. So, if you’re a fan of navigating between apps via iPhone or iPad, then you’ll probably love this new addition.

Resume — “Now when you launch an app in Lion, it remembers what you were doing and where you were.”

Auto Save — It can save your work for you. Super useful when working in pages.

Versions — Again, useful when working on a document. The name of the doc is actually a menu, which users can use to choose between versions of the document.

Airdrop — A peer-to-peer file sharing utility that uses p2p Wi-Fi, no setup required. It makes users confirm on both ends and all data is encrypted.

New Mail app — (About time.) It includes search tokens and conversation view. No labels though.

The new Lion features reflect Apple’s strategy to merge the desktop experience with the that of its iOS platform.

The release includes a set of highly anticipated features such as Mission Control, a centralized dashboard to overview all of your activity, and Launchpad, an easy way to store and launch applications, in addition to new multitouch gestures, a new version of its e-mail client Mail, and other features such as AirDrop, Versions, Resume, and Auto Save.

Also, more notably, the release is the first time Apple intends to port concepts such as full screen applications from iOS, its operating system for the iPad and iPhone, into its operating system for Mac.

Back in October, the company held a press conference to announce the product and demo a set of its key features. The final consumer release is on track to ship this summer as previously announced.

Here are the companies presenting at today’s Launchpad event at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco: G.ho.st, Realius, Cleverset, Click Forensics, TripIt and Spiceworks.

The first three are new to VentureBeat, although two of those have been around for a while. We’ll update this post as we learn more about them. For now, here’s a summary:

G.ho.st — The company wants to provides every person with what it calls a free “virtual computer,” letting you log onto an account from any browser and so you can perform standard computing tasks. It offers you access to 3GB of online storage, email, and software applications including office applications from Zoho and Thinkfree. Here’s an intro to the offering. The company isn’t entirely new, having launched in April. It calls itself an operating system for the Web. Note: Google and many other companies may make this company redundant soon. Google offers a range of online applications, as well as online storage options. Moka5 and Mojopac, meanwhile, are two of several virtual VC companies taking this concept to a new level — with PCs in your pocket.
How will it make money? It wants to get revenue as an Amazon affiliate, in other words taking a cut if people say, buy a book from Amazon while looking at an ad on G.ho.st’s page (this is a longshot model, in our view, and needs work) The company is backed with $2 million from an undisclosed venture firm. Crowd reaction: Divided, though some people really liked it.

Realius — This is a fantasy real estate game site — The goal is to price the value of a home. The crowd of users get to decide the final price. The site plays on the U.S. obsession with homes and home prices. It uses real places, properties, people and other considerations that factor into home pricing, such as data about crime and schools. It offers expert advice to help you play the game. The company wants to target the $10 billion market in the real estate advertising market, only a small fraction of which is online. It launches in two weeks. Question: Are people really so obsessed that they’ll play this sort of game? We doubt there’s a significant market for this.

Cleverset — This is a strange one for Lauchpad, because Cleverset is five years old. But the Seattle company recently turned to develop personalized recommendation technology to consumers who are shopping on retail sites. It is a competitor to Aggregate Knowledge of Silicon Valley, and Wunderloop of Germany, among others. Cleverset records information about products in order to draw relations between them. The method goes beyond existing recommendation services that might, for instance, suggest different kinds of umbrellas if you’re looking to buy one. Instead, CleverSet might also suggest a wide-brimmed hat and a box of chamomile tea. All of the products it knows about can be mapped out and cross-referenced for interesting buyers.
Previously, it offered data-mining technology has been used by the U.S. military to track battlefield assets in Iraq. The National Institutes of Health to determine the likelihood that an elderly individual will stumble and fall. John Cook profiled CleverSet two years ago. Google’s VP of research, Peter Norvig and former Amazon.com chief scientist Andreas Weigend have been advisors. New today: It has 80 customers, and they’re seeing an average conversion rate increase of 20 percent and revenue increase of 30 percent. These are whopping numbers, comparable to Aggregate Knowledge’s claims. The company says it is now raising its first institutional venture capital round.

Spiceworks — The company relies on ads to offer IT management software. We covered it in August. It has plenty of competition, including Packettrap, announced yesterday, though none that we know want to rely entirely on ads. Here’s what was disclosed today: It now has more than 160,000 people using it, and claims it’s growing at 10 percent a month, making it the fastest growing company in IT management ever. Remarkable: The company has a 4 percent market share. It says it has London Symphony Orchestra as a customer. A bit of a surprise mention, because orchestras are notoriously cheap. Question: How are advertisers going to target the orchestra IT guys? Anyway, the crowd reaction to this company is very positive. The company got $8 million from Shasta and Austin, which is a bit of a coincidence considering that Click Forensics (see next entry) got funding from the same two venture firms. Other competitors are GroundWork OpenSource (see our coverage), Ipswitch, Kace Networks and SolarWinds.net.

Click Forensics — The San Antonio, Texas company reports on online click-fraud, has raised $5 million in a first round of financing earlier this year. See our coverage. It is backed by Austin Ventures and Shasta Ventures, and competes against companies like FraudWall, and ClickFacts (see coverage). Click-fraud is when someone clicks on an online page or advertisement purposefully to inflate revenue for the publisher of the site hosting the advertisement, or to make the advertiser pay more than they otherwise would have. Click Forensics is a spin out of Optimal iQ. From the presentation, nothing really new presented today.

TripIt– This is a travel plan organizer that we covered at the Techcrunch conference. Here’s what’s new today: It lets you email the service to request information, such as flight trip times. Convenient for mobile usage.

[Mark Coker and Chris Morrison contributed to this report.]