[microtonal]

I can still push apps to our customers on Windows and Mac desktops like I could in 1993.

Well, on OS X, you'd better have a $99/year developer program account or you cannot sign software. For most users it's a hasse to either disable Gatekeeper or to discover Ctrl/right-click to circumvent it.

Of course, signing software is good. But I'd rather like to accept/verify a key on a vendor-basis and have that used to validate updates. E.g. APT with GPG signing does this pretty well and makes installing signed software via e.g. Ubuntu's PPAs pretty nice.

Linux (and FreeBSD possibly!) will never hit the desktop hard

I agree. And this is why it is important that organisations such as Mozilla and CyanogenMod exist and are well-funded. As long as they keep up with their counterparts, people and vendors will have a choice.

[d0]

The signing missing isn't a major effort. You can turn it off easily with spctl via ssh or allow an app for example. Same with windows domains if you have configured a root CA for your organisation. Even metro apps can be side loaded/self signed on Windows enterprise edition.

Agree with your second point entirely.