Acrobat X Pro prospective buyer questions

Yes, Save as from Illustrator & Photoshop is recommended by Adobe for commercial print. Acrobat has a VERY powerful Preflight feature (since version 5) and it only gets better with every upgrade. It also has a Separations preview. Just make sure to purchase Acrobat Professional (not Standard) for the Print Production toolbar.

On a PC using Acrobat 7 I can print to Adobe PDF printer and choose to print Separations. The output is a nice 4 page pdf (1 page original) of each separation. On Mac OSX7 (Lion) and Acrobat X I am totally unable to do this. I get a message that says I cannot save as a PDF when using the PDF printer if I try to do it that way. If I choose a printer ppd that allows me to print separations it blinks and does not offer me anywhere to save the separations pdf. Anyone know how to replicate the old way?

Quite a few things changed in the Print features on the Mac OS, with the last several updates. This article is on Snow Leopard, but does apply to Lion as well:
http://indesignsecrets.com/acrobats-adobe-pdf-printer-replaced-in-snow-leopard.php
This isn't something Adobe has a lot of control over. You can still print to a PostScript file to get Separations, then Distill that file. I typically create a Composite PDF from InDesign (or other Apps) and use the Separation Preview in Acrobat to check Ink density, etc.

Also, please refer to this document for Known Issues with Mac OS Lion 10.7 & Acrobat:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/905/cpsid_90508.php

Thank you very much for your quick attention. I will read those articles.
What I am doing is pretty specific...moving 1 channel to fix a printer hardware problem. When I distill the separations I don't get 4 pages or separate PDFs which is what I need. It saddens me to say it but it's a good thing I still have my old PC.

You could also try printing the Separations from Acrobat. Are you re-mapping something like Cyan to the Magenta? I'll think on it, there may be other ways to skin this cat...