I'm actually a little surprised this didn't happen in 10.8.
(The iMac may have been a few years too early - they could have positioned the iMac as the trojan horse in this story).
Remember how much business they lost last time they did this (the intel switch, or even the os x switch)? Oh wait...
I suppose if the announced that this was the plan, and gave people years to migrate across, it might be something they'd do. But it would kill basically any technical use of the platform (development, scientific computing). I find it much more likely they'll evolve iOS "up" to support users for whom a closed appliance approach is helpful, whilst adding options to OS X to cater for those who want a more traditional computer but need a bit more help.
* Taking something away from someone that they've always had (as would be the case with OS X) is very different to never giving them it (as has been the case with iOS).
* People are used to doing stuff that isn't possible with the current restrictions - with iOS they've only ever had those restrictions so they're not aware of what they might be missing out on.
* Developer goodwill would evaporate overnight. I'm not even sure it would be possible to develop on a Mac with this sort of restriction in place given the low level activity you often need to play around with.
* They'd need to develop a parallel mechanism for managing machines or lose what little they have of the Enterprise who are never going to use the app store.
I believe the PC will remain a PC. Take away its nature and you might as well just hand everyone an iPad.
Gatekeeper was on for appstore and signed applications and I had to disable it to install something I downloaded (ironically because OS X told me to - X11).
There is no "special certification", it's just a matter of creating a developer account and generating a certificate.
Also, right-click -> open will bypass the verification under the assumption that if you know about that command, you probably somewhat know what you're doing.
As a full-time Linux/Django and iOS developer, switching over to the Mac from Ubuntu is f'ing painful.
Linux's reputation is far worse than it deserves.
The built-in terminal is basically broken: -page-up and page-down don't work unless you hold shift -It uses CTRL-C instead of Command-C, unlike the rest of the OS. -I still can't find hotkeys to jump to the beginning of end of line, or skip over entire words (home, end, ctrl-arrow in Linux and Windows)
Home and End are COMPLETELY USELESS on OS X. I have never, in decades of computing thought "Oh, I want to scroll to the top or bottom of this document with one keypress, but not even bring the cursor with me." Given how often during programming I want to select an entire line, this is broken.
The mouse acceleration is stupid. I know you can get used to it, but then try to play StarCraft or something on it, and you will be awful (or at least severely handicapped), because the mouse acceleration system just doesn't work for stuff like that. Also, Lion broke all the work arounds.
The XCode debugger doesn't let me inspect anything that even might be out of scope. Most of the inspections are useless anyway. You can't even see a list of what is in an NSArray (isa = Class, puh-lease).
Viewing hidden files in Finder is hard enough to not remember. Viewing hidden files on a remote server seems to be impossible (maybe it isn't, I don't care). Simply typing in the folder you want to go to is a huge project.
OS X is a poor network neighbor. It rarely detects my other machines, and when it does it's after waiting forever, and it still barely works.
And, oh yeah, it cost me as much as my other 3 computers combined and is the worst of the 4, spec-wise.
Mouse acceleration does suck. It's directly led to a big decrease in the number of amusing photoshops I make; on the plus side, I've started using the keyboard much more.
I haven't had any issues showing hidden files; I just always show them. Going to a specific folder is as simple as either Cmd-Shift-G or typing "open /Some/Folder/Name" in terminal.
You make a lot of good points. I hated OS X at first, but I got used to it; I could probably move to a nix machine, but there would definitely be a long and painful adjustment period, much as there was for you. And as far as the cost, I'm paying for the OS X design, not the hardware - something not everyone agrees with.
Far more frequently, I want to delete from the current cursor position to the end of a line, and Ctrl+K is much nicer than Shift+End, Backspace.
I've tried various free and paid tools, but no joy (OS X Lion). Funny that I have no such problems with trackpad, but maybe that's attributed to myself appreciating the trackpad too much while using it because every other one I've tried sucked unbelievably.
[ ] Mac App Store
[x] Mac App store and identified developers
[ ] Anywhere
It's actually a fantastic security feature for the average user, so it doesn't worry me that much.
This is one of those situations where you can't really close the barn door after the horse has already left.
What Apple may do is stop developing MacOS altogether and make a variant of iOS for desktop after OSX (or simply rebrand). And I don't think this would be a total shock for the users by the time. Largely because Metro app would be following the store model too.