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I don't know why you seem to be taking it personally, but at least for me, the Vista people seem to have implemented a feature that I really like better than Apple did.

I'm not taking it "personally." You made the blanket statement that the Mac "could not do" what you had just described Vista "awesomely" doing and I replied that the Mac most certainly does... and has done it for a long time before Vista's implementation.

I maintain a lot of Macs... and every one of them has no problem with typing the first couple or three letters of an application in Spotlight and having it startup merely by pressing ENTER or RETURN. Yours appears to be broken.

You have indicated that you are a fairly new user to Macs. You may have overlooked Spotlight. However, from your screen shot, it looks as if you probably need to re-index. Here's how to do it:

Go to System Preferences/Spotlight/Privacy.
Either drag the Macintosh HD icon to the privacy window or Click the + button to add a privacy area and browse to the Macintosh HD and add it as a privacy area.
Close the privacy window by switching back to the search results.
Return to the Privacy window and remove the volume you just added.
Leave your Mac on overnight to re-index.

That should fix the problem of your system not seeing the Calculator in Spotlight.

By-the-way, you can bring up Spotlight by pressing CMD-SPACE.

Thank you for your help. I hope that works.

But I also hope that you appreciate the irony that the list of instructions you just gave me looks no different from some of the arcane instructions that Windows experts sometimes give to people having trouble with their own computers.

All I was saying is that, to, to their credit, MS did an awesome thing and made their Start Menu indexed and responded intelligently to keypresses in a way that makes it easy to get what you want, whether you are a GUI person or a keyboard person.

I didn’t even have to know that there was some weird indexing scheme that needs to be managed. Apple seems a little complicated in that regard. Hell, almost Windows like :-)

In the larger picture, I don’t care if MS ripped it off of Apple. Apple ripped the mouse off of Xerox. I don’t care. MS ripped off the idea of IRQ driven mouse updates from Apple. I don’t care. All of the innovation is been good and amazing for all of us. What counts is the end product that these vendors are selling us, and how well they compete against each other.