This is an oversimplification. Unix trains people to think in terms of requiring deep directory hierarchies because the Unix implementation cannot exist without them (I'd argue some of this is due to historical cruft becoming enshrined over the decades). The OS X Finder never managed to bridge the gap between the elegance of the old Finder and the raw utility of the NeXT browser interface.

Something else, anecdotally: NeXT people never used the workspace to actually do anything. They always went to the command line to copy/move files and do other file management things. My takeaway was that the workspace was mainly a proof of concept.