The last time I used Spotlight (no mac at the moment), it was so slow that I had to disable it globally. The metadata integration in BeOS was different. For example media and email storage in BeOS.

Spotlight is amazing, I use it everyday. It is VERY fast.

I feel like I'm missing out. I occasionally use it to search for images in web applications I'm working on, and that's about it. What else is it good for that i could be doing?

It's a perfectly good launcher, for one thing. Having it right under my fingers (cmd+space) means I almost always use Spotlight to launch apps.