There is an amazing amount of high-quality freeware and inexpensive, feature-complete, amazing software.

NeoOffice J for the office applications suite.
VLC for media.
Adium for chat.
Azureus for torrents.
moinX for personal wiki
Opera for browsing
Growl for common apps notifications
QuickSilver for power users
FinderPop for a Start-style menu
GnuPG for secure encryption/identification
DefaultApps for fixing files that open in the wrong app when double-clicked.
Electric Sheep for screensaver.
StuffIt Expander and UnRAR for stupidly-archived files.
CLIX for all utility jobs

Clix does a bajillion things that a whole fleetload of amatuer programmers, would-be shareware authors, and a few big-name utility applications would like you to think can not be done easily through the Unix command line.

Basically, it does the command line for you. You just have to figure out how the Clix authors would have characterised and classified it. Free, you learn a bit, and most of all -- it doesn't require on Joe Nobody Programmer.

Oh... and it's been six months, and I've disabled Dashboard entirely, moved the dock to lock bottom-right, started just piling all my files into the Documents directory and letting Searchlight find them, and have yet to get serious about playing around with Automator and Applescript.

heh - ok that's what I'm trying to avoid. I'm dead disorganised and have now discovered how seriously bad that is.

But that CLIX sounds like just the thing!

google earth! google earth!

I use the fantastic azureus dashboard widget (and azureus's "scan a directory every 5 minutes") feature to avoid ever having to actually see that awful, awful program.

QuickSilver. mainly for program launching, and document finding.

HandBrake, for ripping DVDs.

TivoTool, (fantastic if you have the right TiVo at all).

FireFox, for the one website I visit regularly that's broken in safari.

Dead disorganized is not a problem. Spotlight will find your stuff for you.

Come to think of it, I think you just helped me figure out how to solve the problem: the folder simply needs an action attached to it that, when a new file appears, asks for some tags, and sticks those tags into the file description/comment.

Then use Spotlight (or QS) to find the file that has the correct tags.

Unlike the above posters, I love the dashboard. The thesaurus widget is a lifesaver, and pcalc gets almost as much use as my Casio.

Other great apps:
TextWrangler is a great free text editor.
The Schupert pdf plugin gives you a little toolbar when viewing pdfs in Safari.
And VoodooPad is hands down the most useful note taking software ever written.

Cheers all. Got Textwrangler. Luv it. Will be grabbing all these other thinsg too.

Now, I have discovered a rather odd quirk - my Photoshop (8.0) is acting funny. If I double-click on anything, or drag and drop on the photoshop icon, or plain old say "open with..." photoshop kicks up, but it doesn't actually open the image. I have to go to photoshop and command-O. This annoys me and didn't happen with this very same CS back when my OS on this machine was plain old panther. Anyone else stumble upon a quirk like this and knows what to do?