With that said PathFinder[1] is an awesome replacement for Finder. Expensive but worth every penny. Still not as clean as Windows Explorer, but it is night & day better then Finder.
Works fine for apps. Windows 8 actually makes distinction between documents, apps and settings.
If you want, of course, you can turn on locate, but it seems strange to have two local indexing things.
I've worked with different utilities, and combined with spaces sort of have a file browsing system that works.
Even Pathfinder can't do this magic easily using the GUI to drag files quickly between folders. Harrumph.
Uh, so does Finder. What are you talking about?
Vox[3] was also pretty decent last time I fiddled with it (quite a while ago).
[2]: http://www.cogx.org/
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&...
I think the above translates to "no, not really."
That's assuming it saw my network computers in the first place, of course. If I try to get to them too soon after booting, they simply never appear.
Many months of Mac frustration taught me these things.