Imagine that Apple decided in the next OSX release to discontinue Safari. Would Apple need to include a utility for users to export their bookmarks/cookies etc before upgrading?
She's a developer, a self-proclaimed "Apple fan girl" but she didn't read up the release notes for ML.
The world changes, features come and go. Expecting them to stay static or to provide you with with air bags in case of impact is unrealistic.
I actually don't think that would be unreasonable at all! Somebody might have important stuff in there, even if most people don't use it.
I didn't know that this feature was removed. I don't know where the release notes that you refer to are to be found, but this page http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html doesn't mention it and neither did the two articles I read before upgrading. I wasn't using it so it doesn't matter to me but the more general point that I should check whether features that I rely on still exist doesn't make much sense. Of course, features are removed from time to time as they should be, but I do think that if that means removing data that I have created, I should have a warning or a way to export my data.
And Apple doesn't aim to please everyone. Note the discontinuation of optical drives, of floppy drives, of hypercard etc.
Most of the reviews I've read (particularly John Siracusa's) point out that the RSS functionality is gone. Now maybe we've gotten to a point where people are treating OSX upgrades in a cavalier fashion, but I think that's a mistake. I always wait a few days if not a week or so to let the early adopters experience the pain.
Actually, for bookmarks you don't need an utility, since they're stored in plist file. It is not as good as it could be, since it's not human-readable and needs plist tools, which AFAIK are available only on Apple platform, to read - but it can be easily converted using these tools to XML format which then can be processed by any tool. So in this case Apple is not good for regular user, but tolerable for power user.
OTOH, Firefox has its bookmarks in HTML file which you could just open in any browser.
