Haha, yes it felt wrong subconsciously to call it non-conventional. Now that you mention it, I totally agree that it is Apple who in the games of doing things the non-conventional way. The opposite of the Unix philosophy. "Take all things, throw them together and make sure they only work in one, blessed, linear way."
Every once in a while I'll make an external backup of my parents' photo collection. Every single time, it's a royal pain to figure out where Apple has decided to put the iPhoto directory. There's no UI that points to it, no settings to configure the save location. It's like you're supposed to forget that these are your pictures to access as you please, and instead treat them as iPhoto's pictures, only to be accessed in the blessed interface.
