I'm not sure I quite understand your complaint about the Mac's App Store. I want to have free reign on my workstation, but part of that is I want to be able to limit the amount of access that programs have. The big difference with the App Store, from my perspective, is that I know that the applications are sandboxed, signed, and someone out there can revoke the code signing certificate.

This is basically what I want, most of the time, and it's hard to achieve it outside the App Store.