Tangentially related — and I'm not dissing on OS X here — but I really like the Linux kernel's Magic SysRq keys. It's a simple concept: no matter what software does, the hardware will always pass through the kernel first; so set up special keybindings to command the kernel to do special things.

Alt-SysRq-f pulls out the OOM killer, which targets the worst memory abusing process and just mercilessly kills it. It's super handy on a desktop OS that's frequently pushed to its limits. Chrome eating too much RAM? Pull out Alt-SysRq-f and kill the fattest Chrome process!