Macs ship with outdated versions of common bash commands and tools as well. Homebrew goes a long way to fixing this for me.
You can fix that of course but homebrew does the same job on macOS.
Roll on 18.04LTS.
It does have the overhead of requiring you actually understand (or know how to google) your system/packages that you use though.
Wasn't that hard to do in the end but it's not something I've done for many, many years and doesn't fill me with confidence.
Other UNIX utilities are actually standard POSIX ones. If you are used to GNU extensions to these on Linux, then Mac ones may seem outdated, but ironically (macOS kernel is called XNU which stands for X is not UNIX) Mac is certified UNIX, while Linux is only UNIX like.