> You know, I'm a mac convert through and through, but for a company that favors simplicity so much that they create mice with just one button, I've never quite understood why there are SO many modifier keys on a mac.

The two are very closely related.

Even though Jobs claimed for years that a secondary click was unnecessary, the market disagreed and very soon, applications started offering a context-sensitive menu, but since you only had one mouse button, you had to use a modifier to simulate that right click.

Jobs never changed his mind, one of the things where he remained wrong until the very end (Macs never shipped with two button mice nor trackpads).