> Alternatives exist. For example: message passing, and STM (software transactional memory). Anybody know of other alternatives?

It should be noted that spinlocks, mutexes and conditions (and semaphores) are building blocks that are necessary to implement message passing, software transactional memory and other non-trivial parallel programming constructs. (at least until we have practical hardware transactional memory).

Spinlocks, mutexes and conditions are a "necessary evil", not "considered harmful".