Having seen an IMac commercial, and reflecting upon one of my Goals In Life to be keeping junk from being installed on 200 PCs on campus; do they make junk programs (deskflag comes to mind as well as screensaver programs), many different kinds of programs to do the same thing for the Mac and countless viewers, a different one needed for each file type?
Do Mac users type paragraphs that are a single sentence in their posts?
I’m not sure what you mean by “junk programs”.
As for file viewers, that’s pretty much a non-issue. For graphics files, GraphicConverter (shareware/freeware) displays just about everything on the planet, including obscure Atari 8-bit image files. Audio files tend to be in a handful of formats, and the included Quicktime player will handle 'em without difficulty. The only real problem might be software-specific file formats, like MS Word documents or Photoshop files, but ostensibly if you need to read those formats, you’d have those programs installed anyway to do work with 'em.
And IMO, general disk-cleaning maintenance is pretty easy on Macs. Cryptic filenames like FDRGRED.DLL are seldom seen; most files have descriptive names like “Firewire Authoring Support”, and an educated guess works fine much of the time (“Okay, this folder called ‘Printer Drivers’ has the names of three dozen printers that I don’t own, I think I’ll toss 'em away.”). MacOS X is even better at minimizing the amount of junk that gets tossed onto it – most Applications are self-contained “bundles” that include the program and all of the support file it needs, so you can simply drag one icon to install the program (or “uninstall” it, if you prefer).
It’s not perfect yet, but it’s a lot less of a hassle than figuring out what those 300 .DLL files in WinNT/System are all for… 
The Word files and Excel files can be read via icWord and icExcel. They can be purchased together over the internet for about US$40.00. Much cheaper than buying MS Office for your mac.
Actually the Preview application included with OS X can display Photoshop files, even those with layers and layer effects. Along with lots of other common formats (tho not necessarily some of the obscure ones that GraphicConverter can do).
If you’re asking whether or not there is a plethora of oddball and redundant freeware and shareware available for users to install willy-nilly on the Mac, the answer is a resounding “yes”.
I don’t think we have anything quite as egregious as BonziBuddy, but don’t be surprised if you walk up to a Mac and find that it has sprouted eyes that follow your mouse cursor, or Bullwinkle peering out from behind the edge of the screen and telling you that you are getting very sleepy; or you open some windows in the Finder and find that all other Finder windows run around until none of the windows overlap; or you start to type and every keystroke results in the sound of an old-fashioned typewriter typing, and hitting return makes the bell sound. And when you go to eject a Zip or other removable media, the Mac makes a barfing sound as the disk is spit out. (all freeware/shareware)
And redundancy-wise, we have the excellent GraphicConverter, but also JPEGView, GifConverter, Apple’s own QuickTime image viewer (PictureViewer), the QuickTime MoviePlayer (which also displays images), PhotoGrid, Prowler, SimpleImage, and probably dozens more.
Is that what you mean by “junk software”?
Yes.
Thanks.
It’ll probably get “worse”(*) with MacOS X, because Apple’s including the developer tools for free if you buy the boxed OS, and the native Cocoa/Objective C application builder is reportedly a dream to use. One of the animators at Pixar said he banged together a storyboard tracking/editing/annotation application in one evening, when he had initially planned a few weeks for the effort.
(* = “worse” is in quotes because I don’t think there’s such a thing as too much software )
I might find this not entirely un-useful. Wanna drop a name?