I’m not an apple user so I’m asking this question out of ignorance. But I’ll ask anyway :)
If there is BSD underneath why don’t you have the power of the BSD command line interface. Why couldn’t you put the disk in, mount it, issue a dd command (or whatever).
Again, I don’t know, so just asking.
You DO have the power of the BSD command line.
I work from the command line (choice of all the usual shells) a lot, right on the desktop. There's a "Terminal" application standard, and a full "X11" application package for running xterms and other programs like OpenOffice which use X11.
There's no requirement that you use the GUI except at login, and if you are logging in remotely using SSh, you don't even need the GUI for login.
It's a full, largely-standard BSD Unix. The only stuff that's a little different are functions like user accounts, which are managed from OS-X level rather than the old standbys like /etc/passwd.
Well, that won't really work. You can't mount the disk because a blank disk doesn't actually have a filesystem on it. You can't use dd command because writing to a DVD (or CD for that matter) is different from writing to hard disk or flash memory device because DVDs are essentially WORM (write once, read many) devices.
Now, If you knew what you were doing, you could create an ISO image of the DVD you wanted to create and then use a program like cdrecord (or whatever is available for Macs to write to cd/dvd media) to write the ISO to the DVD.
I've actually done the above from a command prompt in Linux, but generally don't any more as there are pretty good programs for Linux now that automate the process.
You can, if you want to do it that way.