Shutting down is used infrequently, so there is some logic in putting it farther away.
Now let's look at a few things that never made it into Windows :)
The desktop was special. If you move a folder or a file there, it would remember the original location of it. Later you could select things on the desktop and choose "Put Away" from the menu to move them back into their original locations. The idea was that you could do that to organize the work the way you do it traditionally: bring the current work on the desk, work on it, then file away.
If this sounds like it would break file references, no, it wouldn't. On Mac applications normally remembered files by their internal ID, so you could rename a file or even move it into a different folder and still find it via the 'recent' files in your app.
Files and folders were "things"; this is why there was always one window for a folder. If you open a file or a folder, the icon of it changed into an outline to show that it is currenly open and there is a full-scale window for it somewhere. If you clicked the icon, it would trace the way to that window.
The window of a folder remembered its settings, including the manual arrangement of icons inside. Together with color labels they made it very easy to organize small sets of files. (I do realize this won't scale to today's millions of files, but I indeed miss it for smaller projects.)