Up until now, Apple has used its own AAT font technology for complex fonts instead of Opentype, which is primarily pushed by Adobe and Microsoft. While AAT is superior in many respects (and probably inferior in a few), Adobe's CS products have made Opentype more of a standard.
The good news is that Tiger apparently now supports most Opentype features to the equivalent AAT features, so we will now get contextual ligatures, alternates, genuine small caps, and so on when using Opentype fonts with these features. (For an example of how these features work, play around with Hoefler and the typography menu in Textedit.)
Apparently Opentype support for complex scripts (like Arabic and Indic) isn't there yet, but it's a good first step.
(Source: Adobe employee Thomas Phinny at the Typophile forums)
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