One of the very highest priorities for OSX should be to get backup software, such as Retrospect, to work with the system. Sure, it's only a beta, but folks should be able to backup their files, especially when working on a system that may lose some files owing to bugs. This seems like an inexcusable oversight, but the Mac OS has not traditionally provided backup software. A Unix-based system should have at least rudimentary backup built in, however.
The Mac desktop was always a counterintuitive illusion as the attachment point of all disk drives. A unique desktop folder always existed on each drive, and these desktop folders were confused by being identified with each other on the desktop. What was worse, items on the desktop quickly disappeared from the view of all but the most fastidious organizers, there being no way to bring the desktop to the top of the pile of stuff on it. So I say good riddance to the desktop as the place where all disk drives live. In real life, my file cabinets do not sit on my desktop, and I can get to them and pull out more documents no matter how cluttered my desktop may get!
The OSX desktop ditches the disk drives, trash, printer icons, and everything else that clutters it up in the Mac OS9 and earlier. It serves only as a normal desktop, the place where work is done and piles up until it is cleaned up. It is possible for the user to place all manner of items on the desktop for routine use, but nothing is forced to be there by default. In the OSX beta, it appears that the "put away" command has disappeared. It would be great to restore this automation of the refiling of items in the places from which they originated.
Now that mounted disk drives all appear at the "Computer" level of the Finder, it is always possible to bring disk drives to the top of the heap of work on ones desktop, just by switching to the Finder. It's difficult to see how this can be regarded as inconvenient, counterintuitive, or an obstacle to productivity, though some have depicted it so. Otherwise, the Finder can appear much as it always has, but now there is a choice of whether to spin off a new window whenever a folder is opened, or to open the folder in the window already in use. This closely parallels the options available in web browser windows, where opening a page into a new window is often very useful, but sometimes unnecessary. Also converging with web browser conventions, the new Finder has a toolbar at the top of each window. As for web browsers, this should clearly be a user option that can be easily configured.
The Finder is indeed a browser that is configured for file listings rather than rendered documents. Ideally, the Finder will be someday be capable of browsing files on network shared disks as well as local disks, in place of more awkward FTP clients, though it isn't clear this is yet the case. At some point, a single piece of software will do the job of the Finder, a web browser, and an FTP client, configuring itself according to the URL specified (file://, vs. http:// vs. ftp://). With OSX's use of Adobe PDF technology, we can hope that high resolution postscript document rendering will be built into a web-enabled Finder. Such a Finder could also browse the help files, and provide a search engine for that as well.
Departing from web browser conventions, the Finder includes an optional multipanel view of the file system hierarchy like that used on the Next OS, and like that available for OS9 and earlier as "Greg's Browser". This is a very nice tool favored by code developers and others who build complex file hierarchies. It will come in handy even if you never use it! But Apple should study more closely the functionality in Greg's Browser, and provide at least as good a combination of features (for example, editing of filename/type/creator).
There are times when Finder functions are needed when there is no room for the Finder onscreen. At these times a quick pulldown version of the Finder is essential. The Apple menu used to provide this function, and was user-configurable to provide access to anything on at least the system disk, while utilities like FinderPop provided access to the desktop and all mounted drives, the application menu, and other extensions, from contextual menus as well as the menu bar. The Go menu should provide this same support, but in the beta, at least, it seems limited and is not evidently user-configurable. This needs to be fixed.
I had my doubts about the use of the Dock for minimization of individual windows or documents. However, after using it, I found this useful when switching between one of several open documents in one application and another document in another. The other windows could get in the way, and this provides a way to work around that and display only those windows that are needed at the time.
My only objection to the Dock is that it seems to have eliminated the application list pulldown menu, which should be included with the application menu that is now at the left end of the menubar. There should always be more than one way of doing things, and a pulldown next to the application menu is a very intuitive place to switch applications. Keyboard shortcuts for application switching are also very useful at times.
In the beta, these capabiltiies seemed quite limited. For example, I could not figure out how to permit anonymous FTP to a specified area. If I tried to define a user "anonymous", that user ended up with free run of the entire file system, if not privledges to do much damage. It was similarly very unclear what the purpose of various Public folders should be. In addition to a Public folder for each user, there was another Public folder at the Home level (where all the User folders are stored), which appeared suitable for sharing among Users, if not for anonymous FTP.
The web server (http:) worked well enough, but there were some problems with moving previously shared items from the OS9 area to the Web Server Documents folder under OSX. The owner of these files ended up as "root" rather than the administrating user, necessitating some gyrations logged in as root to get full control of them. This should perhaps be a bit better thought out or documented in the help files. All of this is handled much better by Stairways Software NetPresenz, a 10$ shareware addition to OS9. Apple would do well to study this software and implement comparable features for configuring web and FTP services.