Agreed. I've yet to find anything remotely as fast as the Picasa app (even running under Wine) for organizing photos. The gap is somewhat filled by the rise of SSDs (even slow apps are faster when disk speed increases) - but I would've loved for them to open source the thing rather than kill it off.

Of course, real desktop apps goes against the need for all content to be in the Google cloud where it can be mined by Gooogle, so I'm not surprised. I guess Total Information Awareness makes for great ad sells.