Well, I’m a UNIX geek by day, and I think you’re exaggerating things a tad. 
I had a glitch with printing when I upgraded to 10.3 a few months ago, and the solution was to delete a couple of Preference files (y’know, drag icons to Trash?).
Yes, it is possible to do a lot of tinkering with MacOS X if you want to open Terminal and snope around the UNIX underbelly, but if you don’t, 98% of the stuff can be done straight from the GUI anyway. In my experience, if there’s a bug that “requires” a UNIX CLI solution, usually someone will wrap that up in an Applescript application in five minutes and stick it on the internet.
As I said, I’m a UNIX geek by day, and even I don’t bother with the CLI on MacOS X. I’m too busy being (more) productive and having (more) fun to be a geek in the evenings.
