I wondered if anyone would mention this. I love those features, and without having a separate meta-key for GUI commands, Apple wouldn't have been able to do it. It's something I really appreciate when running Terminal.app as well; cmd does stuff with the GUI, and ctrl does what you'd expect in the terminal. There are no additional modifiers or quirks to deal with like there tend to be in Windows and Linux.
This is actually one of the biggest reasons I am still in Mac OS. Are there any *nix builds or distributions that have this separation out of the box? I.e.: C-b, C-a, etc (emacs commands) including C-v for scroll (and not system paste) and S-c for copy, S-v for paste (where S is super key or win logo or something similar).