I only use keyboards with the english international layout although I'm from Austria and the german layout would be the natural one. Therefore the keyboard layout in the OS is also set to english international. I do this because I program.
And still I'm very happy about the easy access for special characters, because in literally every email I have to use one of ß, ä, ö or ü.
Really? I guess it might be different with the german keyboards, but I've had no difficulties programming on a Swedish keyboard.
They are: I am addicted to vim, and I use bash/zsh in emacs mode, so having the consistency is incredible.
Also having cmd+C for the GUI and ctrl+C for the command line is awesome. This last feature is one of the few things that kills Linux for me (ended up hacking on GTK, which turns out to have both an undocumented setting and an obscure compile time constant somewhere that ends up not working. And no, remapping every single app shortcut is not an option — I tried).
(I didn’t mention metakey access to typing typographically correct characters: –, “, ”, ‘, ’, … etc)
- International text input: I can't remember the last time I had to use accents or special characters not in my native language; a few greek letters for formulae, and generally I can use '/alpha' instead of α. Isn't having to use chars not in your language pretty uncommon?
- Trackpad quality: yes, I love using Macbook trackpads, but I use the mouse/trackpad very little anyway, and isn't something I find useful enough to miss much.
- emacs keybindings: sounds fantastic, but a) not many people use them and b) don't know if they'd be that great for Vim-ers like me.
Even if there are a lot of things that Mac might do better than Windows and Linux, I agree that the popularity of so many cross-platform tools and the web have nullfied a huge part of it.