Not only does it lack them, there is a huge amount of resistance to porting them because they are 'against the spirit of plan 9' or something to that effect. Which increases the barrier to entry.

I'm a huge fan of the principles behind Plan9 but I've never done much more with it than install it, play around with it for a bit, read documentation and newsgroups on what makes it tick. Other than that I've de-installed it... And I would probably use it, maybe even on a (light) production box to see how well it would fare in real life given a chance.

But the amount of stuff that is missing compared to vanilla unix makes that a non-starter.