Yes, Apple copied/borrowed some of the best features of notifications on Android and webOS (they did hire the guy who made them for webOS, after all).
The new update features enhanced cooperation between Apple and Twitter, along with the single most important feature of all, the notification bus modeled after Android's top-of-screen alerts.
Android lacks a feature of User Customized Notification Area.
It followed the massive overhaul of its core product (Profiles) with big upgrades for its mobile apps, the addition of notification features, among others.
But perhaps the company has something interesting planned for the upcoming Push Notification feature of the iPhone 3.0 software due this summer.
Those little alert balloons are part of the Notifications feature of OS X 10.8, the system otherwise known as Mountain Lion.
Think of Growl (very similar to the new Notifications feature of Mountain Lion); the Classics app (whose bookshelf design was borrowed for iBooks); Instapaper (now made obsolete by a new feature in Mountain Lion's version of Safari); and so on.
The app also includes search (Seesmic stores all the info in cache) and will also feature notifications of new Tweets and DMs while you are scrolling through email (a little raccoon will pop up with a number of new Tweets, says Le Meur).
Another feature of Foursquare is the push notification system, the latest way companies like the Wall Street Journal, the History Channel and VH1 are informing users about nearby venues or points of interest.
