[fryke]

It of course depends. I don't see a "need", really. Panther's a good operating system. But a few of the features will just be so nice to have that you won't want to miss out on them. You've mentioned Spotlight, which I still consider the single most important Tiger feature. It'll simply enable you to finally find what you want very, very quickly. Sure, you can use Panther's search in the Finder, but it won't be as fast and it won't be as thorough.

There are other things. Automator, for example. Not sure whether you're a candidate for it, but it'll certainly help ease a lot of things for a lot of users.

Dashboard will be fun - and hopefully also useful (depends on the widgets devs, of course...).