Despite my complaints about performance, I do use Spotlight constantly, but like you say I'm just using it for apps and files, it's nothing but frustrating to see them try to redesign it around a global entity search paradigm.
Yeah. I wish there was a way to turn off full indexing of content. Content search always shows me pages and pages of junk. "Oh, looking for your todo list? That word showed up in this 1gb video file! And all these C header files. And ..."
The last good file search I've ever used was in windows 98. There was no indexing. When you did a search, it looked through all the subdirectories for a filename which matched the search term. It was glorious.