I'm with you on this.
Osx is pretty dire overall, it has one saving grace which is a proper BSD back end so I can use a terminal to get work done. The lack of which in window makes it windows utterly useless dog excrement for actual work so OSX needs to be commended for that.
But it is silly that a supposedly easy OS ends up forcing you to do everything through the terminal if you want any control. As you said, the file manager is worse than windows 3.1 and is basically useless and can be uninstantalled. I hate doing file management in a windows most of the time which is why I never touch windows but at least in windows it is relatively easy. I had an issue the other day when I wanted to sort files by types but I had my baby in one hand and thought I could do it with the mouse one handed. Complete failure of an OS, I had to spend several minutes on google searching for proper file sorting. I can't remember the bizarre procedure involved. It's default sort is by categories, so JPEG and pigs would mix together rather than giving a list of jpgs then a list of pngs.
And that is just one example of an uncountable set where OSX just is insanely backwards. I wanted to then view a slide show of some images and this again involved having to use google to find a solution. So it turns out you have to select all the photos and press some odd keyboard combination like space + control + shift or command or some such. This is just so typically of OSX, you want to do something simply and you end up with some key combination of 5 keys which require 3 hands or discolcated fingers when on any other OS it is just a right mouse click or press the delete key.
Then there is the stability issues, it makes windows seem like a dream which is saying something. And the memory usage is through the roof.
It's a damn shame because I would love for it to work. I typically use Linux for anything serious but sometimes have to use windows for things like lightroom, or for gaming. People try to sell OSX as an optimal combination of the best parts of windows and unix. It's not, it's an awkward combination of most of the worst parts of each but with a mostly usable terminal thrown in to keep you sane. There are more or less as many software issues as Linux (I still have to have windows for several software packages, even design related stuff, as well as gaming) and the terminal and BSD core is not as convient as Linux.
Basically windows plus Linux dual boot is a far better setup than OSX, which is pretty much how I use my iMac 90% of the time!
(Just for the record I won an Air and an iPad mini and love them both!)