Actually Preview lets you do a lot of the things you'd want to do with an image editor and -- unlike MS Paint -- what it does, it does very well.
It's a much better PDF and image editor than, for example, TextEdit is a text editor.
It's a much better PDF and image editor than, for example, TextEdit is a text editor.
I must poke around Preview later to see what it can do.
That seems like the perfect feature set to me, I’m not aware of any situation where I actually needed to manipulate the pixels of an image. Cropping, resizing and saving in different formats is the most important functionality to me and in that respect Preview seems much more useful than Paint.
I actually never really need pixel manipulation. Tools like Lightroom are perfect for editing photos and I don’t see any need for Photoshop or similar tools at all if all you want to do is edit photos. The only time I actually needed Photoshop was to create bitmaps for a website (rounded corners, backgrounds, …).
(Preview also allows you to edit PDF documents. You can crop pages, delete or rearrange them, or easily merge pages from different PDF documents into one, all just by drag and drop.)
$ sips -r <degrees> <image file>
Note that sips updates the file in-place, so make a copy first if you wan to retain the original.
(sips does a whole lot more as well, though its interface is a bit odd. See sips -h and sips -H as well as its man page)
Well then you're not creating any images, just modifying existing photos and screenshots. We're talking about different things.
It's simple, fast, easy to use, and does its one thing very well.
It wasn't until Paintbrush 2 came out that I didn't have any individual software from Windows that I missed when using OS X. I've never tried Pixelmator however so that might be a better replacement.
Seashore was another MS Paint-like editor for Mac, but looking at the current screenshots, it seems to have expanded scope now.