Very Windows-like behavior for Macs

I fell victim, along with apparently a lot of other Mac users, to a recent buggy Mac update. One of the late February updates, probably "Security Update 2008-002," totally hosed our family room iMac (17" intel version). Safari, Software Update, and several other programs just crashed upon startup, and the whole thing would CRAWL for a few minutes, be OK for a few seconds, crawl again, etc.

One fella on the discussion forums suggested manually downloading and re-installing the most recent OS system update, 10.4.11. Tried this, and it hung at 86% and I had to force-restart. This is usually a huge no-no, because the chances of even being able to boot after such an interruption are usually low. When you interrupt a major system update halfway through, it gets very messy.

Anyway, it did restart eventually (after a LONG time - during which I hunted for the original system disks!) so I tried the 10.4.11 updater again. This time it got a little further before crashing.

Fortunately, I found one more tip on the Apple Discussion forums and this one worked - the system is recovered and working properly once again, even with the partial application of 10.4.11. My steps are below; here's a link to the full thread.

1. Repair permissions (Applications / Utilities / Disk Utility; select main hard drive and click "repair permissions")
2. You need newer, non-buggy updates - but because the Software Update program crashes, it's necessary to run SU from the terminal. Go to Applications/Utilities/Terminal and type (without quotations) "sudo softwareupdate -i -a"
3. It will download and install updates, and probably ask you to restart immediately.
4. After restart, repair permissions again and run the terminal version of Software Update again.
5. After the second restart, my system was back to normal.

I've expected this sort of behavior from Windows, but not from Macs, and frankly I'm quite disappointed. I can't help but wonder if Apple's growth and increasing market share and growing line of products and services won't lead to further self-inflicted injuries like this.