PrePressProduction.com / Mac OS 10.3 / Finder

The Dock has a user interface bug: If you access the Dock using the keyboard, and then move to a folder using the arrow keys (or Tab), you can then access that folder's contents by using the up arrow key, but after that you can't get out of that menu! Esc takes the focus out of the Dock entirely and you have to re-call the Dock and go back to square one (or icon one to be more exact).
Panther's Expose feature is excellent and is probably the coolest trick to show to your Windows friends... but don't hold your breath... Windows versions of Expose are already showing up on the Web. It's a testament to how nice a feature it is. Caveat: QuarkXpress 4.x users will want to change the global shortcuts for Expose (for example Control-F9) so that it doesn't interfere with QuarkXpress's Measurement, Pages, and Style Sheets palettes.
Panther's Finder is noticeably faster than Jaguar's.
OS 9's Labels are finally back after many complaints, but it's a bittersweet victory for the purists. Instead of bringing back the simple method of colouring the folder, the Finder now ignores the folder entirely and colours the background of the whole row in list view (the whole file name in icon view). While the labels in icon view are not that bad, in list view they are downright hideous, and very distracting. Unfortunately, there's no way to change the colours to lighten their impact. Why didn't Apple simply bring back coloured folders?
The "new folder" bug that didn't highlight the file name for text entry in list view has been fixed.
The new Application Switcher, ~~stolen~~ borrowed from Proteron (the creators of the excellent Liteswitch), has the same bare-bones functionality as Liteswitch, but is not as elegant (for example, you cannot change the size of the icons, and it doesn't always remember the last application you were in). Actually, there's a lot more drama involved with the Proteron situation than meets the eye.
Menu drop-downs are more opaque and more legible.
The zooming rectangle that indicated a launching application has been replaced with a zooming icon of the application instead. It's a nice little touch.
Selecting "Don't show hard disks" in the Finder's preferences no longer hides Firewire drives. I'm not sure if this is a pro or con, but it seems to make some logical sense (internal versus external disk).

Cons

By far the most annoying feature of Panther's Finder is the new sidebar. It takes up a lot of space, and is completely UN-customizable. You can't make the huge icons any smaller; there is no text-only view; there is no global setting to have it hidden by default and there's no keyboard shortcut to hide it – you have to manually drag the slider for every single window you open (each window will remember its state, including new windows); turning off the toolbar entirely for a window reverts it back to the OS 9 behaviour where each folder will open in its own new window. While this ugly sidebar may be useful to Windows-switchers, new users, and simple users, it leaves experienced users and power-users feeling like we're using a child's toy. (It should be noted, however, that this sidebar also appears in open/save dialogs and is the one place where it's really useful.)
Another really annoying feature/bug of Panther is that when you are in a standard Save dialog, clicking on any greyed out files will automatically change your current filename to match that file's name! Of what possible use is this to anyone?
Favourites are gone. Presumably, Apple intends us to use the sidebar instead of Favourites. This means that you must always have a Finder window open in order to access the sidebar, unlike Favourites which was accessible from the "go" menu with no windows open. Anyone who used Favourites as a pseudo-OS 9-menu is out of luck.
Just as the previous versions of OS X increased the spacing in the Desktop's grid, Panther has increased it even more. This results in icons taking up even more valuable screen space. There is no way to adjust this grid as you could in OS 9.
Clicking and draging in a Finder window while in list view no longer shows a rectangle. Instead, files/folders simple get highlighted. You can only select files/folders by their horizontal name bar; you cannot select files by clicking and dragging anywhere outside that narrow bar. End result: you have to be more careful selecting via click and drag, and you'll invariably move a file instead of highlighting it.
Apple, in their infinite wisdom, have given the keyboard shortcut Command-option-drag to two completely different functions: making an alias, and scrolling within a window using the "grabber" hand. When in list view, combined with the "click and drag" bug mentioned above, the ability to scroll is basically thrown out the window (no pun intended).
In previous versions of the OS, you could usually select a secondary button in a dialog through a keyboard command, such as Command-period, even if it wasn't "cancel". This is no longer the case. End result: More mousing. While the new "keyboard shortcuts" panel lets you use a shortcut to "toggle focus for any control within windows", this ends up being more work, and doesn't always work as expected.
The "Find" search window's focus defaults to the last used pane. Therefore, if you clicked anywhere other than the search field (such as to select a particular disk to search within), the next time you use Find, the search field will NOT be highlighted and you can't begin typing your search term until you select the search field with the mouse (tab doesn't work). Update: Use Control-Tab to switch to the search field.
Network browsing has gotten a lot flakier in Panther. Servers will automount unexpectedly on boot, even though no servers have been added to the user's "startup items"; the "network" browser under the "go" menu doesn't work on some Macs. update: this seems to have been fixed in version 10.3.3.
Panther has serious issues with Firewire drives. Earlier releases caused significant data loss on some models. A subsequent release supposedly fixed this problem. Nevertheless, if you have an external Firewire drive connected, you should make sure you back it up frequently.
There are some other minor annoyances that relate to the aesthetic and logical (or illogical) qualities of the user interface, but I will omit them here because they are somewhat subjective, and only of interest to a handful of people.

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