Lost among the hardware specs and announcements of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, a huge fact was floated with little fanfare accompanying it. It turns out that there are now more than 66 million Mac users worldwide. Of those users, 26 million of them have already purchased Mac OS X Lion.

That fact means almost 40% of Mac users have already adopted Apple’s latest operating system, which has been out for less than one year. Indeed, the presenter who stated these facts said that Mac OS X Lion is both the fastest-selling and best-selling Apple OS of all-time.

It was also mentioned that Mac OS X Lion outpaced Windows 7 in terms of sales and adoption. OS X Mountain Lion is due out sometime in July, meaning it will beat the Windows 8 launch date by months. Considering Apple’s smooth demonstration of its upcoming operating system, and the looming disaster that is Windows 8, it’s likely that this scenario will be repeated over the next year.

However, these numbers can be seen another way. OS X Mountain Lion will be released less than one year after its predecessor, Mac OS X Lion, which less than half of Mac users have yet. Is Apple iterating its software too fast for consumers to keep up? The average consumber, maybe, but die-hard Apple fans will pounce on OS X Mountain Lion like a hungry Puma. Pushing software out quickly is certainly part of Apple’s strategy to keep ahead of the market. It pushes out newer, better hardware on a yearly basis while dropping support for older devices, thus forcing customers to upgrade.