[robgough]

May I suggest you look into "Hot Corners", which is built into OS X and allows you to specify certain actions when moving the mouse to the very corner of the screen.

I heavily use the gestures, but I still find these rather handy

My setup is; Top Left: Show Desktop Top Right: Expose (on Lion, Mission Control) Bottom Left: Blank Screen (without sleeping) Bottom Right: Screensaver

[sid0]

Hot corners seem like a terrible idea, simply because they're far too easy to acquire (by Fitts' Law). I don't want Expose or whatever to show up every single time I move my mouse to the top right corner, which is often accidentally.

[robgough]

I've had this setup for years now, and never accidentally done this.

Don't forget on a Mac you're much less often moving your mouse to the top right corner (window closing is on the top left of a window.

The further most icons are always the Apple on the left, and Spotlight on the right. Both of which I rarely open by hand. If I'm using Spotlight it's always by keyboard command Cmd-Space (though often I use Alfred instead).

And at least on a Laptop I rarely need to shutdown the Mac, which is all I'd use the Apple menu for. Though again, anything I'd go to that menu for I use Alfred for instead.

May be worth turning it on and see how you get on with it?

[sid0]

Don't forget on a Mac you're much less often moving your mouse to the top right corner (window closing is on the top left of a window.

I move the mouse to the top right whenever I want to just get it out of the way.

May be worth turning it on and see how you get on with it?

I don't use a Mac. Wait, let me correct that -- I use a MacBook, but with Windows on it almost all the time.