I like OSX and I like Windows, have been a professional dev on both platforms. I totally understand where the post is coming from, but as a life long mac user, this is my perspective :)
I think the two big, major things the author missed are 1) OSX "power users" tend to be UNIX nerds, so doing things from the terminal is easy natural for them, and even if GUIs did exist they would probably go unused. While PowerShell is great, it is almost more of a scripting environment. UNIX is in my bones :) 2) When you buy a mac, expect to drop another 100-200$ on software to make it awesome (it is still reasonably easy to survive as a 1-2 man dev shop writing mac software as shareware, so there is a LOT of amazing shareware out there). By contrast, on windows, there is less software of that level of quality out there, but most of it is free. Good or bad, it is what it is, and has been that way for as long as I have had a mac (system 7 days)
- use http://www.alfredapp.com/ one of the best launchers out there for any OS
- use http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/ if you want to do any reasonably complex file management with finder
- people who grew up on macs don't maximize unless they actually need the full screen (like using an IDE), but don't maximize for pretty much anything else (like browsing the web). The "zoom" button will change a window size to fit the current content of whatever you are doing (or should do that). Which makes it easy to browse the web while having your adium contacts visible, tweetbot visible, and making it super easy to click on itunes or airmail that are floating in the background without having to move the mouse all the way to the dock (or alt-tab a bajillion times). That being said, there are many, many apps that will let you control window size with your keyboard. I use http://mizage.com/divvy/
- Just like in windows, having a huge amount of stuff in the menubar is probably not recommended, as it will murder performance and battery life. That being said, I use http://www.macbartender.com/ on my macbook air.
- alt-tab will re-order based on the last accessed window, so a single alt-tab will switch between chrome and your editor, and an alt-` will switch between the most used chrome windows, always. Mac apps historically spawned more windows, which is why this was preferrable. But again, you can probably get around this by just not maximizing everything
- your right, although most power mac users I know just use top (or htop) when they want to see that info
- totally right, which is the main reason I have never intentionally used fullscreen except when watching a movie
- I use divvy for that