I use my computer for work all the time. That's why I wanted a portable laptop. I am a scientist so its nice for me to carry around all the articles I need and also to be able to use latex to write up the stuff I want. I also like to read articles in PDF a lot from the computer. I often have a lot of things open at the same time like many webpages, a few pdfs, the mail program, maybe itunes, and, if I'm working with tex, I like to have a few vim windows, a terminal and a dvi viewer. That's why its nice to have a very functional virtual desktop program. That's also why I want a window-level alt-tab. I am a vim user and have been for years which means its not completely trivial for me to use TexShop and such programs because I have to set them up to use an external editor like vim and this is where the non-Unixy part of OS X makes my life difficult. Vim does everything through the command line so I either run an OS X native version of vim which works better with TexShop (but can't jump to points in the file) or just use X11 vim (which is uglier) with xdvi (which is horrificly ugly). I'm still trying to decide exactly which to use. This may sound weird but if you use vim with LaTeX-suite (a package for vim) it has features that I've been told are missing from TexShop (like citation and reference completion). Also i'm hooked on vim syntax and wouldn't want to switch.
Anyway, these are just some of the reasons why i find OS X hard to use. Its probably very tied in with my usage habits since i tend to leave tons of applications open all over the place (which you can easily do with virtual desktops) and like to use seperate applications that integrate via the command line (this is a very standard unix thing). There's probably a better way to use OS X so I'll see if I adapt to it or not ;->
p.s. I do waste a lot of time tweaking my machine and responding to posts on this type of forum both things I'm planning to do less of ;->
