The built-in multiple desktop support (ctrl+arrow left/right to switch) plus Spectacle[1] (free, open-source) will get you most of the way there. There's no good way to get rid of window title bars that I'm aware of, though having them there does mean you can switch seamlessly between normal OSX window management and sort-of tiling management via Spectacle.

Spectacle's default keybindings conflict with (override) Chrome's primary next-tab/previous-tab keys, but there's an alternate command+shift+[ or ] binding for those actions in Chrome.

[1] http://spectacleapp.com/

Amethyst: Tiling window manager for OS X similar to xmonad, written in pure Objective-C.

http://ianyh.com/amethyst/

On top of that, I use shortcat to add keyboard shortcuts for all (ahem, most) GUI interaction.

The other comments recommend better options to simulate xmonad/other tiling wm's (FYI there is a version[1] of xmonad in development that works with native OS X windows) but for distraction-free work I really enjoy OS X's fullscreen mode. Often to avoid distractions I'll fullscreen everything and use gestures to go back and forth - gives you an identical experience to an iPad (unlike the statement in the article).

Using the gesture to hold two fullscreen windows visibly at once but not relying on tiling or overlapping is surprisingly useful and productive.

[1]: https://github.com/xmonad/osxmonad

I was a long time xmonad user on Linux but I spend all of my time in OS X these days. I haven't found anything that rivals the power a full fledged tiling window manager but use Divvy to bind hot keys to actions "fill the screen" or "fill the left half of the screen" or "fill the bottom right quadrant of the screen" etc and I'm able to create a workflow that's a reasonable compromise.

Divvy has worked quite well for me.

Spectacle and ShiftIt are two alternatives I later heard about, but haven't yet tried, so please let me know if you try them out and find a clear advantage to either (besides price).

Run everything in X11. I wish I knew of another way to run a decent tiling manager.

Run Linux/*BSD in parallels/vmware.