Exactly. Ever since I got one of those lil' white Macbooks in 2006 I've been so happy to be able to simply search for files with Spotlight and find them instantly, something Windows had never given me the ability to do.
Works fine for apps. Windows 8 actually makes distinction between documents, apps and settings.
If you want, of course, you can turn on locate, but it seems strange to have two local indexing things.