Most processes do go away when their associated services aren't in use. When I logged out of Game Center, gamed went away next login. I disabled all of my iCloud-enabled services, and ubd went away next login - until I ran an iCloud-enabled app (such as TextEdit). However, it did disappear after a few minutes after that.
Yes, what I described is a minor inefficiency, but this won't affect the performance of your system at a practical level. There's less point "optimising" the OS nowadays, as computers have become very performant.
Also, apps that are using new 10.7 and 10.8 technologies are going to start spinning up more processes, and for good reason. Apple in 10.7 introduced a robust mechanism called XPC Services for separating an app's core privileges (like computation, disk I/O and network) into discrete processes. This has two improvements - applications can more effectively be sandboxed (to 'harden' the OS), and applications will have less tendency to crash from programming errors. When these external processes have finished their jobs, xpcd will go ahead and shut them down.
If you really care about what processes you have running so much, you could say Snow Leopard is "bloated" as well. For example "com.apple.dock.extra" provides the mechanism for apps to customise their dock tile even when they aren't running. Based on your logic you might not need that if you're certain you have no apps that have that behaviour. However, I honestly don't see any reason to go to this trouble as they're very light on memory, and almost always sit at 0% of CPU usage. And plus you might break functionality in any future apps you install, without being aware of it at all.
If you're having performance issues with 10.8, it will likely improve in a future update. This has always been the trend.
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(and Win) fanboys have to garbage up every thread. There are plenty of threads comparing Apple with Microsoft and OSX with Win 7/8, this one is about Mountain Lion.
