> An extra complication is that, as a casual OS X user, it seems to me like OS X terminal emulators and tools are more likely to munge with the path than Linux terminal emulators and tools, so even if you get everything set up "just right" you end up having it not work properly in certain contexts like plugins because something has modified the path for some reason.

GUI apps not being able to access $PATH is a big one, I have found.