It really depends on how OS X chooses to impose upon how the pixels are used. If the new "retina" desktop is merely a 1440x900 point desktop with much sharper fonts and artwork (much like how the retina iPhones are merely 320x480 point views), then this isn't necessarily desirable to someone who truly wants the higher-resolution workspace.
Care to explain? The "retina" iPhones have pixel dimensions of 640×960, where each pixel is composed of a red, green, and a blue cell. The OS UI widgets have been updated to display well on this new physical resolution. What do you mean by "how the retina iPhones are merely 320x480 point views"?
On those devices, Apple simplified the way UI layout is done by fixing the usable coordinate system at 320x480. As an app developer, you position things on retina devices no differently than on non-retina devices; placing a button at (160, 240) puts it at the center of the screen in both cases. The higher resolution / DPI is only used by the low-level font and graphics toolkit. As far as the developer and user are concerned, the device has a 320x480 "desktop" either way.
You can imagine an alternative scenario to this in which everything on the screen is half as big as it used to be yet equally detailed, with four times as many icons fitting on the home screen as before. This is what it would be like if the full resolution of the retina display were utilized just to provide more real estate instead of more detail.
