And my experience is that people who say the same thing as you do are ignorant who have never used either Photoshop, The GIMP or have no business using either and should stay with something like Picasa.

For the record, The GIMP doesn't even have what we call "Non-Destructive editing" which allows to make a change to some of the filters and transformations you did on the image much later even when the image has been touched by other editions. It has been supported by Photoshop for way more than a decade, already. After all of this time, the Gimp still works like a toy and has zero productivity.

Zero. There is nothing productive about The GIMP. Anything you can do in The GIMP will be done faster with a competitor, Photoshop being the best in the category.

And before anyone comes to tell me that "THE GIMP IS FREE!!!11!ELEVEN!", Photoshop isn't expensive for a Photographer either, so price does not enter the game here. If you're a photographer with one or more DSLR bodies, lots of lenses, travel equipment and so on, spending some money on one measly Photoshop license is not going to kill you. The gain in productivity will more than make up for the money spent anyway, the Gimp truly is an awful tool compared to Photoshop. If you can't afford something like Photoshop it means that you can't afford being in that business in the first place.

When I made my comment I was really referring to one or two-step processes, such as creating a new layer, or adding a border to an image. These things are very easy to do in photoshop, but GIMP makes them more complex than they need to be. (adding dialogues when you create a new layer), requiring a filter to add a border to an image (but I'd be surprised if they hadn't changed that by now).