I maintain that the thinking in terms of application is not a bad thing. In the Linux community, it often seems to be really hard to justify not using on particular program in a category... "but they do the same thing and your favourite isn't in our repository, so use this instead". Woe betide you if you prefer an app on another platform. Taking the obvious Photoshop/GIMP example, and many (although not all) Linux advocates can't see that GIMP is not an acceptable substitute.
It's a symptom of a bigger issue, where the feature list of an app is valued above how those features are implemented (i.e. the usability). Whatever you think about the Delicious Generation trend on the Mac, the developer community here spends enough time thinking of usability. But getting usability right often means removing options and configurability, and limiting the feature set. This all goes against a lot of the Linux philosophy.
Essentially, if you discourage people thinking of a particular program, and suggest they specify desired functionality instead, it removes the ability for one program to be better than another. Since usability is not quantifiable like feature set is, it means that the user experience tends towards zero, as app developers move towards the only metric left for their app to be judged on: "Does it do feature X?".