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so that ordinary users can add applications to the Gnome menu

Ordinary users problably don't install Gnome by themselves. They probably use a distro such as Ubuntu which has menu editing out of the box.

Menu editing *hasn't* been fixed? Users still cannot edit the application menus in a sane, convenient fashion?

If your distro don't have a menu editing app (Which is a freedsektop spec btw) you can install any third party app for it. How about this one

Sure. It would be nice to have as default in gnome, and probably will be at some point in the future. Until then, it's probably already included as default in your distro.

Try this, please. What an uninformed post. ;-/
http://www.realistanew.com/projects/alacarte/

For the record, since Gnome 2.10 uses the freedesktop.org Desktop Menu Specification, you can use any menu editor. It is true that gnome-menu-editor hasn't shipped with Gnome before 2.12, but nothing has stopped you from using Smeg or even kmenuedit!

Simple Menu Editor for Gnome.

Sound: Yes you are correct. Only Sound Blaster Lives will not have this problem out of the box because the Live drivers were written by the SB Live ppl themselves as to NOT lock the sound input device when applications wish to use sound.

There is a project called polyaudio which is a drop in replacement for ESD that solves just about everything. It is already superior to ESD in every way plus it does not block sound input at all no matter what driver is used. Faster as well and resolves a lot of latency issues that ESD had plus has a very clean API as well.

Synaptic: The point is that the average mom doesn't use this anyway since all the important things for everyday use is already installed by default.

Applications: This is actually gnome 2.10's fault not ubuntu. Gnome 2.10 is in the middle of a total menu redisign to the freedesktop.org standards. Ubunut is the ONLY DISTRO I know of that has actually addressed this issue by providing links in their forums to SMEG (http://www.realistanew.com/projects/smeg/) which allows you to edit the menus using a gui.

Firefox: Never had a problem with this on either the x86 or the amd64 versions of firefox. I've had issues with some poorly written flash applications chewing up the CPU but if you don't want that flash app (most pop-up adds) you can install adblock extention for firefox and block specific items very well. Perhaps this is why I have never noticed these problems. I've blocked pretty much every advertiser that exists meaning not even their flash stuff will even get downloaded muchless viewed.

Menus: They have done a wonderful addition here but they still have room for growth in my opinion. They have (in addition to all of linux) serious bluetooth issues and it would be nice if bluetooth would work and show up in the places menu as well. Just like their USB storage devices do.

Folder Navigation: Look in the lower-left corner of the window. You see that button which has the folder icon and the name of the current folder. Click it, it will let you choose ANY of the parent directories. Also the Ctrl-L is a very nice shortcut for doign tab-completable (zsh style) directory changing as well but for the new users clicking on that button is the way to do it. You are just PREPROGRAMMED into thinking the windows way of doing it is the best. Once you use spatial for a while correctly you'll quickly realize why I emphasize that comment. Spatial really is great and everyone hates it only because they don't bother to use it and assume that the old outdated ways are best. Also, double-clicking with the middle mouse button will open a folder in a new window rather then the current window.

I'm working on it.

I've gotten OS X Panther to install as well, you can see it here. Took about 7 hours on a Duron 1.6Ghz with 512MB SDRAM.