"I'm also patiently waiting for Linux to catch up to OSX in usability/UI."
That gave me a chuckle. The first thing that the Linux world should do is decide on one UI to use but that will never happen. It is philosophically impossible.
As it was "impossible" for Apple to decide when all they had was the old Macintosh toolbox and NextStep UIs, but they did it. They made Carbon/Cocoa to look reasonably consistent despite huge internal differences.
Linux can do the same with Qt/GTK+/etc. It certainly possible to have high-level UI consistency between multiple toolkits, especially when they all share the same lower-level stuff (X11/Cairo).
"Philosophically." With Apple, they had mechanisms of corporate governance to simply declare a standardization plan and follow it, and require developers to follow suit.
That gave me a chuckle. The first thing that the Linux world should do is decide on one UI to use but that will never happen. It is philosophically impossible.