Completely agree. OSX hides so many things away from me. It would take days of configuration of a fresh OSX install to get to a state where I could work with. Having to install 10 payed 3rd party programs to make the system itself usable(SFTP, File manager, KEEP A WINDOW A TOP(!)) is ridiculous. Also, having a Unix where half of the stuff was moved around is not a good starting point in case you're working with a ton of Linux Servers.
It sounds like you did this before. In which case you should have restored from a TimeMachine backup. Your restored account is pretty much identical to your old one. The only reason you can tell it's not your old machine is because you have a physically different machine. Takes maybe 1-1.5 hours.
The Lion updates will soon (devs need to update their software) make things even better for users. Auto save and built in versioning.
