Bill - I'm not here to convince anyone, it's a free world but I don't see a conflict.
I have machines on Linux at home too. When I want to be productive And do stuff, I use the Mac. When I want to run a web server or anything without a GUI in production, I mostly run Linux. (I probably would prototype on the Mac)
The Mac has the stability and power of unix because it's unix underneath. But it is made to be accessible to the masses. Linux failed on that mass market and if you ask why, my thinking is it's because no one took responsibility for the user experience.
If you are an engineer or an IT minded person then complexity and making decisions for yourself might be fine. But If you are my mom or dad - it Is definitely not right. They will never need to to see or understand what /bin or /var are for (or even use the terminal app on their iMac)... and for billions of people on the planet it's the same. They aspire to focus on what they want to achieve, with consistency in a safe and welcoming environment where you don't need to be the night Sysadmin, where it's easy to find apps, where software updates come regularly and you don't need to wonder if you need version A or B of this system update.
So it's all about indeed Making decisions on what needs to be visible, what needs to be accessible for half power user (the shift trick in the go menu) and what you leave to the command line. It is walking a fine line and every decision count. I grew into appreciating the attention to the details and understand why they would go one way. most of the time if I had to make a decision to myself on how to configure stuff, I would have ended up there. The alternative is Either you decide not to draw that line and make all options, bells and whistles available to everyone, and you address a small market of tech savvy users who strive in the millions of options and think this is freedom, or you take the risk to unplease some people and take the responsibility. That is what they do. May be indeed it's not for you - I'm a unix fan - for a very long time - but I know how to appreciate what they offer. I get to be the power user when I want, and so far there is no feature i can't work around. It's just needs the right bit of work to understand the environment, just like you need to invest time and effort on the Linux side.
But again - that is just me. If you get what you want from Linux and love that experience and feeling - go for it. But be honest to the community here - and don't say they have "restrictions" because you are just taking about something you don't know about. The power is right there under the hood for the right users.