This, along with hardware support, is why I don't run Plan 9 as my only OS. Porting a modern browser to Plan 9 would be incredibly painful, and I believe the codebase of Chromium or Firefox is larger than Plan 9 itself these days!

> vim

Someone actually ported vim, and it's pretty easy to install from contrib.

> symlinks

These are a deliberate omission; the ability to rearrange the filesystem with bind doesn't correspond exactly to symlinks since it's done as a property of the current namespace rather than stored in the filesystem, but with the idioms that are built around bind, I've never missed symlinks at all.

Sorry for going into defensive-weenie mode and attacking your positive post!