Some of these features I regularly add to Ubuntu (Terminal session here, or mounting ISO's, for instance), and others I think are insanely important (what is with OS X having no Up Folder button? I still have such a hard time getting around without it.)
Display the path at the bottom of the window (it's in the View menu I believe). You can click on any part of it so you can go up one level, two levels, whatever all the way up.
Sometimes it's about finding a different way of doing the same thing, not just looking for the exact same implementation.
1. Right click on the folder (so-called "proxy") icon in the titlebar, which will give you links to all the folders up to the root
2. Assuming you drilled-down into this folder from its parent, click the back button or (with a multitouch trackpad) three-finger swipe to the left.
All the functionality you're describing is available in Vista/Windows 7.
But the up button? It's just better. You don't know what you're missing.
Comically, your scenarios #1 and #2 even clash with each other. If you do #1 then #2, the "back" operation goes deeper into the tree. If you navigate from C:\a\b to C:\a\b\c then to C:\a\b, the behavior of "back" is now different based on how you went from b\c to b, whether you did that by "back" or by clicking the address bar link!
The Backspace key always did "up" in older versions of Windows, but does "back" in Windows 7, which annoys me all the time. Alt-Uparrow does work consistently, but my muscle memory isn't there, and it's jarring that there's no symmetrical Alt-Downarrow operation.
a. Right-click (Secondary click) on the toolbar in Finder, click on "Customize Toolbar" b. Add the "Path" icon. c. This is really useful in that you can go through the folder hierarchy, to the target folder, within a couple of clicks.
E.g. command-up to go up level (to parent), command-down to go into a folder or open a document, right-arrow to disclose, left-arrow to fold, start typing to match any item, shift arrow to build a multi-select, and so on and so forth.
Most of this dates back to System 3.x.
Also, closing an application with a single mouse click...