As far as I understand, the versioning implementation in OS X is built on top of SQLite, which has one-reader/writer-at-a-time-only transaction semantics. I wonder how much this contributes to the beach balls. Save As must come back. iCloud syncing of Notes is broken. Notes which are supposed to be in iCloud often get branched to On My Mac without me noticing, where I continue editing them, only to create conflicts.…
I'm not sure what causes the beachballs, I've been meaning to crack open lldb one of these days and try and find out. As for Notes syncing - I've been making fairly heavy use of it recently and never had a single issue, hopefully that will simply come down to teething problems and be addressed in a 10.8.x update. Your suggestion about merging Notes and TextEdit is really thought-provoking, probably not entirely possi…
With more care, Apple could make OS X great not just for users but also for developers. Xcode must be installed by default, along with command line tools. A package manager as good as apt-get is something Apple should take as seriously as it does iTunes and the AppStore.