No, the majority wanted to stop it from continuing to be inverted, as it has been for decades. If you do a significant percentage of your computing on a touchscreen, having the touchpad work the same way is really, really nice. After a few days of Lion, I switched all my other machines to do scrolling the same way. Now that I'm moving to Linux instead of Mountain Lion, I was happy to note that I can swap the up and down scroll with a simple command, and almost everything respects it (oddly, some things don't).

Have any actual data on that (to be clear, data that says that people didn't like / wanted to change the way that computer scrolling has worked for the last 25 years)?

I have no data. The first part of that bit ("... majority wanted ...") was intended to be somewhat hyperbolic, but I would expect that a survey would show that heavy smartphone and tablet users tend to keep the Lion default, rather than switch it back to the traditional scroll behavior. Haven't actually done the survey, though. :)

You are aware that the same “simple command“ is a checkbox in the OS X system preferences, right?

Yes, I am. I was just pointing out something about Linux that was easier than I'd expected, not dissing OS X. If you read the last coupla years of my history, you'll note some bitter rants from me about how 2010's Linux hadn't improved nearly as much as I'd hoped since I moved to OS X in 2003. So, I'm often pleasantly surprised these days. :)

The majority have never known an Apple product that worked any other way.

?

I think he's referring to the OS X users that started out with the iPhone, iPod or the iPad as their first Apple device and then bought a Mac. (Not that I agree with the argument).

I know, but if he's speaking to expectations, the brand of computer isn't relevant.

I don't think this follows.