Programs under Mac OS X do not typically jump to the front and into focus. If the author has a gripe with this happening, it is probably with a poorly written program or a program in which this is a feature. One of the nice things Apple did with Mac OS X was attach the dialog events to their respective windows. Now if anything comes up and the system wants to redirect your attention to another application it bounces that application's icon in the dock until you take care of it.
The dashboard is useful, if you use any of the widgets. If not, it can be easily ignored. There are nifty dashboard widgets for translating languages, converting units of measurement, and reviewing the local weather forecast. That's really what dashboard is about anyhow, quick access to tiny little, often used utilities that are a pain to keep in the dock individually. It also helps that using dashboard doesn't require having to launch every widget individually. It is loaded and ready to go when you need it.
^^^^^^^^^^^Now if anything comes up and the system wants to redirect your attention to another application it bounces that application's icon in the dock until you take care of it.^^^^^^^^^^^^
Yeah, that would be as annoying IMHO as is when windows' taskbar(on the right hand side) spams your desktop with info from whatever's running in the background. "two new updates are available" "your firewall is not running" "click here to take a tour of windows" and so on. Those also take away focus from whatever you're working on.
What my system does(suse) is change the color of the corresponding program's label on the taskbar, and leave it in the background. Doesn't flash, doesn't jump around, and doesn't *take the focus away*.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^The dashboard is useful, if you use any of the widgets.^^^^^^^^^^^^^
If I didn't have multiple desktops which could be used for *anything I want*, a second "desktop" via widgets I could see how that could be fairly convenient. But having multiple desktops it seems like a useless toy at best and it's a limited second desktop at worst.