Yes, because then they don't all start at once, fight for RAM and swap around while leaving my computer a useless lagging mess when I just want to open a browser. It's probably okay in some cases, but it shouldn't be the default. Instead of prompting before shutdown, it could display a dialog on boot with a list of applications that had been running. Click on one to restore it, and have a "Restore All" option at the bottom.
I noticed on my old MacBook there was a considerable delay relaunching apps, but with my new one, between more RAM and the SSD it's pretty instantaneous, as is the restart itself. I was always careful about quitting apps to free up RAM on the old machine though, but just relaunching Chrome and bringing all my tabs back up was enough to do the same thing.
I'm a huge fan of the inverted scrolling, though.