I'm not sure what causes the beachballs, I've been meaning to crack open lldb one of these days and try and find out.

As for Notes syncing - I've been making fairly heavy use of it recently and never had a single issue, hopefully that will simply come down to teething problems and be addressed in a 10.8.x update.

Your suggestion about merging Notes and TextEdit is really thought-provoking, probably not entirely possible now - but I can really see Apple doing that down the road.

I agree about apt-get, Homebrew's great and all, but it it's not fantastic. I can't ever see Apple doing this though.