Comment by comex

Looking at mine...

I prefer Safari over all other browsers, due to speed and better UI, although it loses on security to Chrome. Firefox, meanwhile, didn't have Retina display support until half a year after that MacBook Pro was released, still doesn't have disappearing scrollbars, and has no smooth zoom, and I have many other sorts of complaints about it.

iTunes, despite all the various crappiness, doesn't have much good competition and usually works well. Playing music off an NFS server is not a normal use case.

Preview is a brilliant PDF reader.

I use Gmail chat, but if I weren't using a Mavericks beta with broken Messages.app, I would also be using that for iMessage. FaceTime also works well.

Mail.app is pretty great; it has some flaws, but is better than most of the competition not named Gmail.

Terminal is a great terminal app (you'd think this wouldn't be hard to achieve, and I think iTerm is roughly on par now, but the latter used to be quite terrible).

edit: oh, and QuickTime Player is nice; might not support all the codecs of other players, but the seeking/frame stepping is nice and smooth, compared to VLC which can't step backwards at all.

YMMV, but I think the suite of default Mac apps is not bad at all.