Respectfully, it seems like every time I see this comment it's from a Windows power user who's not that familiar with OS X - can you please provide an example?
-- Selecting an arbitrary menu item Arrowing through a menu is key for me. I'm writing from memory but last I recall working on a mac, the menus were strictly mouse only.
-- What's the equivalent of the start button, giving a list of available I can select with the keyboard? I remember not being able to navigate the launch bar with the keyboard, only the mouse. And at that time, I Googled for a while for help on this.
alt-tab == ⌘-tab
Restore == Ctl-F3, arrow key to window in Dock, return
Arbitrary menu item, depends:
Application Menu (left-handside text menus) == Ctl-F2, type enough unique letters to identify the menu (or use arrow keys), return, type enough unique letters to identify the item... repeat till you get to the item you want. If this annoys you, you can implement your own keyboard shortcuts in any native application.
Status Menu (right-handside icon menus) == Ctl-F8, arrows, return.
Equivalent of the start button? Not quite sure what you mean - activate Spotlight ⌘-[Space], type app name perhaps?
I assume you mean Dock when you say launch which is activated by Ctl-F3.
The only one I don't know how to do is fine-grain resizing of a window. If you use OS X though, you'll realise the UI paradigm isn't focused on fine-grained window control though.
Plus I actually suspect that a many application don't implement the keys you've mentioned since I was definitely at-sea in my efforts to use any keys.
But thanks, I'll have more ammunition the next time I'm stuck Osx-land.
Don't take this the wrong way, but Windows skills don't translate to other platforms. OS X will feel different, weird and limited if you're not familiar with it as it doesn't do things the way you're used to.
To be honest, I rarely use most of these shortcut keys because I define my own.
A basic example is that it's two keys to start a VPN session on my machine as that's something I do frequently.
A more complicated one is as at the moment I'm doing work on a site that includes screenshots of itself, I have a shortcut key defined that takes a series of screen grabs from different pages in Safari at the appropriate size, converts them to PNG and sticks them in the appropriate folder. Huge time saver.
In short, it seems to me OS X can do anything with a keyboard shortcut that you'd like it to.