You can use the Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad. Not sure what you mean by "last of decent short cuts," OS X is pretty keyboard friendly. Maybe just unfamiliarity?
Go to Desktop (This is stupid it is Fn + F11 OR Command F3 based on what keyboard you have) Also Win - D makes a lot more sense! It is a default motion on a track pad.
File Manager - Windows (Win - E) Mac OS NOTHING
I have never seen why Mac OS gets a pass by so many people when there are clear paper cuts in its interface and it gets worse and worse over the past 10 years.
That damn Windows key drives me nuts - press it accidentally during a game and it kicks you out!
Anyways my usual way of going to the desktop is to just command-tab to Finder, and then command N to create a new Finder window, or any of the shortcuts in the Go menu.
Nobody is claiming that the Mac UI is perfect, but it's been way more stable and unified than Windows. Of course there was Windows 8, but even Windows 10 still has things like both the new Settings and old Control Panel, and the old start menu next to the god-awful, ad-ridden Live Tiles. I recently tried to enable automatic login on my Windows 10 laptop and was told to run "netplwiz" in the Run dialog command line. It's a mess.
I like that the Mac uses the Super key for common shortcuts, which frees the control key for Emacs-style keybindings. It seems that besides i3, no other popular desktop environments allows a similar setup. I am a Mac convert after I start writing code seriously and as much as I still like Windows, I can't go back because of this.
As much as I also love Linux (I know, I love all 3 major OS for different reasons), I cannot use it as my full time desktop OS for obvious reasons. MacOS currently represents a perfect trade-off for me.
Go to Desktop (This is stupid it is Fn + F11 OR Command F3 based on what keyboard you have) Also Win - D makes a lot more sense! It is a default motion on a track pad.
File Manager - Windows (Win - E) Mac OS NOTHING
I have never seen why Mac OS gets a pass by so many people when there are clear paper cuts in its interface and it gets worse and worse over the past 10 years.