The issue is not that one would like to tinker, but that without a significant time investment tinkering, you can't get the basics working.

Nothing precludes the OS from being tinkerable but mostly working out of the box.

In my experience this hasn't been true of (some distributions of) Linux in several years. I've talked to a lot of people who hold this opinion and they generally haven't tried Linux in 5+ years.

I think for the general case yes, but there are still some rough spots on certain hardware (e.g. power management on macbook pros and so on). Some other smaller things, like attaching an apple keyboard to ubuntu creates up with pretty weird mappings for a couple of keys. Configuring the keyboard under those conditions is pretty confusing.

Why I love OS X.

I remember using Terminal to change every single .string string to "LOL" on one of the school macs. Good times indeed...

Yes, if it's your hobby. If you need to get something done (time = money) but have to stop to fix something in your free operating system then it is no longer "free" (as in money) I'm not talking about the openness of the system in relation to code etc..

If you have to change something in a closed system, it will either be impossible, or cost zillions of dollars (whatever it takes to convince Microsoft or Apple to do it for you).

A number of years ago, working on a semi-embedded system, I hacked the way Linux boots from USB devices to speed it up, which made the people I was working for quite happy. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about - I would expect to find a lot of people with similar stories on a site like this.

Also, configuring Linux machines is not really that onerous in this day and age. I suspect more time is wasted complaining about it than in actually doing it. There are certainly still some exceptions, and if you want the ultimate in "mom friendly", Mac OS is probably the way to go. But for a 'hacker', the ability to explore and modify might trump that need for ease of use.