Probably the single biggest hurdle I had to clear when I moved my primary desktop habit from Windows to OS X is the dependency I had developed on a utility called Dave's Quick Search Deskbar (http://notesbydave.com/toolbar/doc.htm), which does a lot of the things you apparently find in LaunchBar, except that in the Windoze case it's just a DHTML script that drives IE via Automation, so it's a giveaway. (I keep hearing people talk about how easy AppleScript is, but a year down the road from adopting OS X as my Main Machine, I can still knock out COM Automation scripts a lot faster, even in Perl.)

Which brings me back to the dark side of my love/hate relationship with Apple. The little desktop trinkets that Macintosh ISVs write and sell are usually functionality that you can get for free on Windoze, because either Microsoft throws it together in their spare time and gives it away (e.g. PowerToys), or because somebody else does.

This is not to say that I'm about to abandon OS X. I am probably atypical among "switchers" in that before my preferred desktop was Windows, it was Motif. But I hated MacOS and Apple hardware for all the years I had to buy and support it (for my wife) on OS 7, 8, and 9, and although the cost of Apple hardware is finally at least competitive, there's still a significant differential in the cost of software.