I used to run a slax based distribution on Asus eeePC and It would get better battery life than Windows XP and I got a good few hours on slax without very much tweaking. I think it really comes down to the hardware on the laptops ability to independently save power although I do agree that power management has to come much further in the linux world. P.S. OS X is not based on BSD, its a derivative of the mach microkernel, the precursor to OS X "Nextstep" had parts of FreeBSD incorporated into it.

I believe you are mistaken. Earlier version of OS X required WebKit in Finder, but leter version such as Tiger and Leopard can function fine without WebKit being present. You can test this by removing it from the systems plugin folder.

Because you can remove safari from OS X if you choose to. Finder isnt based on Safari and it isnt a vital part of the system, whereas you can't uninstall IE since its part of Explorer and the whole system.

Isn't the Guardian about 24 years late with this scenario? David Lightman can tell you all about it.