Anyway, I totally agree about the Dashboard. At first it was ridiculously cool to me. Then I saw that there were other copycats that were just as good (if not better).

Apple needs to either amend it or get rid of it.

Microsoft is in the stages of removing their sidebar metaphor (as introduced in that failure we know of as Vista) and placing the widgets directly on the Desktop. If Apple were to do the same with OS X, not only would you have access to “information,” but you’d eliminate a keyboard shortcut as Expose’s Show Desktop feature would be able to display the widgets as well. Of course, that still leaves the problem of the Dashboard icon Apple thoughtfully screenprints onto all their keyboards now…

Another part of the problem is, as you mention, the widgets that accomplish nothing as looking up an e-mail address is probably most useful *gasp* when writing an e-mail. Perhaps these should be replaced with more useful things like site traffic meters (I know I might make use of one, as I check the stats on my blog at almost paranoid rates) or things that would require jumping through multiple hoops to get at.

Until all of this happens, though, I suppose OS X users have enough bloat to worry about now that they’ve picked up their “reliability and performance update” for Chess.