There are a number of faster ways to launch an app, especially Spotlight. I’ve been using Lion since the first Developer Preview and I’ve only used Launchpad a handful of times. In all honesty, I find Launchpad to be fairly useless. Once you trigger Launchpad, you're shown all of your Mac's programs in a tile layout identical to iOS's Home Screen, and its behavior is as expected: apps can be moved into folders, and can take up multiple pages which can be navigated using your touchpad or your mouse. Launchpad acts as an individual application so you can add it to Dock (though it is there by default) or you can launch it using a specific gesture, or simply Spotlight it. It’s heavily influenced by iOS’s Home Screen and anyone who has used iOS will be familiar with Launchpad’s functions.
Launchpad is Apple’s new application launcher.
