[antiRepublicrat]

Takes all of 1 second using locate.

Searching on a PC NEVER takes only one second. It does on a Mac. If you've ever used iTunes, imagine a search of every file you have the same way.

I would say that Linux has me pretty much covered.

Linux does have some neat stuff, but it's still not this good. The main reason is at the OS X screen compositing layer, where all the windows on your screen are essentially treated as layers in a Photoshop document. It didn't take any hacks to do the cool stuff because the OS was designed from the ground-up to be able to do it.

[explodingspleen]

Searching on a PC NEVER takes only one second. It does on a Mac. If you've ever used iTunes, imagine a search of every file you have the same way.
What does running on PC have to do with anything? I have just run locate and, in retrospect, it actually takes a fraction of a second. The chief limitation is not even the search, it is the output to screen. Piping the output of a search for files with "home" in their name or path to a text file, I counted two-mississippis before it completed, with 51269 files having been located and written to the text file.

Linux does have some neat stuff, but it's still not this good. The main reason is at the OS X screen compositing layer, where all the windows on your screen are essentially treated as layers in a Photoshop document. It didn't take any hacks to do the cool stuff because the OS was designed from the ground-up to be able to do it.
That type of alpha compositing should be incorporated into subsequent version of GNOME; I don't know if it's in the next release or not. KDE supports a variation on that which is, you're right, not as seamlessly incorporated into the code as Apple's, but for me is more than enough. I don't really want transparent application windows, personally....

And I may be picking nits, but gcc isn't the "Linux compiler," it's the GNU open source compiler commonly used on most NIXes.
cc was the original *nix compiler, gcc was the non-proprietary derivative which was originally implemented as part of Linux (or GNU\Linux, as you prefer). I refer to it as a Linux compiler in the same sense that I refer to a Volkswagon as a German car, even if it's being used in America by an American. :)