What's this travesty with resolution independence

Because it's a non-issue? Because people have forgotten about it? Because it really, really doesn't matter for most cases? Because people didn't develop for it like Apple told them to do way back before Tiger? Because it's going to be moot once we get Retina-style displays on the real computers?

Take your pick.

Higher screen resolutions don't really help - if you increase the size of the screen enough, the bitmaps sampled for the UI will become pixellated. Similarly, if you scale the bitmaps to a size that can't be represented by whole pixels, you degrade the image quality. That's why Apple always doubles the x/y resolution of the iOS devices so that the upscaling is pixel-accurate.

The only solution is to migrate from bitmaps to vectors but it makes some things harder to do. You don't for example store rendered gradients, they are all rasterized at run-time so if you have a complex design, a vector format won't be able to reproduce it as easily as a bitmap. When it comes to a UI though, there's only so much complexity you need.

Apple have some support already. There are a few icons that are PDF vectors in the OS e.g:

/System/Library/Frameworks/Automator.framework/Versions/A/Resources/VariableLarge.pdf

If you QuickLook that file and scale it to fullscreen you can see it is sharp at any size. If you do the same with the Address Book icon, it pixellates but you can see the difference in detail as the AB icon has the leather pattern. It is possible to do very complex vectors using a gradient mesh but for a patterned surface, you'd still need a high density of points. Maybe Apple need to have a word with the guys at Pixar to come up with a tool to construct a best-fit procedural texture generator from a given input bitmap that executes on the GPU.

The easier route is to have hybrid graphics where the shape is defined by a vector and the fills defined by either vector or bitmap where the bitmap can be repeatable. The vector shape then acts as a mask for the bitmaps.

I think our computers are powerful enough now for a vector OS. I'm certainly ready.

Though web pages and browser rendering might not be...

Resolution Independence is one of those awesome things that just works... On Windows 7. Ouch. When will they get with the program at Apple. C'mon Steve, you wear glasses man! You know what we are talking about here!

(yes I know it's "fake" in Windows but it works)