Does OS X make *nix too easy ?

[Xade]

Flame me.
I love OS X and I am ploughing thru a Unix handbook as well as Mac OS X Unleashed to get to grips with the underbelly of OS X . But more often than not my desire to get at the meat of X is side tracked by the ease of OS X in nearly every issue of usage. OK I have to ask questions here and search the indexes of my reference manuals for bits and pieces but more often than not OS X more than meets my needs and from what I can see this is only going to improve. I eagerly awaited OS X to get to grips with a 'proper OS' (as one of my college tutors used to put it ) but I'm so often able to ignore the geek nature of a BSD that my need to research the *nix layer is a passing whim. Don't get me wrong I love the taste of fresh blood from chewing over terminal problems but X just steers me away from the hunger! How many others have dreamed of this sort of desktop power but find that the Aqua loveliness hypnotizes them into this ( in this case) justifiable RDF ?
I might edit this later when my headstate is not so warped.:)

[Phil St. Romain]

I've never really needed the Terminal to get my work done in OS X--only used it to implement a few "hacks" that have since become available in a utility using a gui. And that's how I think it will continue to go, which is fine with me and I'm sure most veteran Mac users. I'm glad the Terminal is there for if I need it, and for all who make extensive use of "the power of Unix." But I don't really think I'll need to learn CLI to do what I need to do in OS X.

[Ron Goodman]

The majority of the Terminal usage I see suggested has to do with permission and ownership problems. If people were more aware of BatChmod or Super Get Info, (better yet, if OS X included one of them), there would be a lot less discussion(and complaining) about the Terminal. I grew up on a command line system, and I'm not afraid of the Terminal, but I hardly ever have to use it.