Only for people who memorize application names. I bet you feel fine in front of a CLI, too. (Not a knock against, I like Launchy as well.)

Do some time as a tech support, and eventually you'll get a request to help them with "this application, you know, the blue one. With the pictures and stuff?"

Not sure about lunchy, but since it's similar to gnome-do and others - doesn't it search on descriptions or custom aliases too? I never type "thunderbird" for example - it's always "mail" ("ma" actually), or whatever word I associate with the app (this has the added bonus of allowing me to open company's crm via "crap"...)

That's true, but are these people likely to have so many programs in the start menu anyway?

I may be tainted by academia: IT loaded computers with about 150 applications keyserve'd.

Surely academics don't look for the "orange curvy thing" instead of MATLAB, though.

Anybody in the hard sciences was pretty competent, except for a couple of HTML-related issues.

Fine arts, education, sociology, and just students in general, however... And I say that with an art degree, too.

launchy is great, but since I switched to OS X a few years ago the best replacement I've found is quicksilver. It's free and much more responsive, customizable than spotlight.

Quicksilver made OS X useful, for me. It's absolutely fantastic.