I spotted the following discussion which may be of interest to those of us
trying to decide whether OS X is [better|worse|"different"] than NEXTSTEP:

http://www.macrumors.com/forums/showthread.php3?threadid=28
  "...I was surprised to note that, in working with my NeXTSTATION Turbo
   Color workstation (68040 @ 33Mz, 32MB RAM, running NeXTSTEP v3.3) this
   weekend, NeXT applications and the OS in general do indeed feel
   significantly snappier on this machine than OS X and its apps do on my
   b&w G3 400 (256MB RAM, UltraWide SCSI)..."

It does somewhat match our experience (though see below).

Whilst I'm here, if you haven't already seen it, Apple announced a new iBook
this evening (our time), which seems to be the poor man's Ti PowerBook G4
(certainly a major improvement on the previous nasty toy); and the 10.0.2
update to OS X, which allegedly includes some significant performance
improvements (though I'm waiting a couple of days in case there are any
funnies; especially since we're running our copy of OS X on an unsupported
PMac 8600/250! :->)

        charles