panther looks to be sweet. libiconv, color ls, and -h support in du and ls -l. sadly, ls -sh doesn't do what i want; for that i'll have to wait another year and another $130. i'm going to need to take a week off when it comes out, because all i'll be doing that week is watch expose and user switching go.
kudos to apple, though, for doing cool (and useful) stuff with display postscript/quartz extreme. i have a lingering feeling that most of the cool technologies in gnome never really made an impact to users, but that might be unfounded.