Never mind the usability desaster that the GIMP represents for anyone who is accustomed to PS.
In the interest of fairness...I just bought Adobe CS4 Web Premium (with Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.). I've been working with the GIMP and Inkscape for a good long while, off and on, and I'm still finding Photoshop and Illustrator to be incredibly hard to use and obtuse. I've been watching video tutorials, reading the docs, searching the web, and tinkering, for a couple of weeks now, and I'm still nowhere near as productive as I am in GIMP or Inkscape. Partly this is just that the Adobe products do more. This is an acceptable cost, to me, but I still find myself feeling grouchy a lot of the time because things do not work as I would expect (not just "as the GIMP or Inkscape would do it", but also in terms of discoverability...for example, sometimes I accidentally break my workspace, or whatever it is called, and can't figure out what I did or how to fix it; you can't undo workspace changes, as far as I know).
Take it all with a grain of salt, as I'm a barely functioning idiot with quite a few products that are supposed to be easy to use. iTunes, for example, is a nightmare for me; I always end up deleting my whole collection either on the device or on the computer or having something else go totally amok and I have to reboot into Linux just to recover all of my data. So, maybe Adobe software is "easy to use" like Apple software is "easy to use", and I'm just an idiot.
Stability of the Adobe stuff also leaves a lot to be desired. It's kinda like Inkscape a couple of years ago, or GIMP ten or twelve years ago (or during the 2.0 beta years). Sometimes weird things happen and it just freezes up. This may be the newer Adobe stuff; I'm usually watching a tutorial video when it happens, so maybe Air or Flex or whatever is to blame, rather than Photoshop or Illustrator. But it happens a lot when I'm watching those videos.
There are most definitely stability problems with Photoshop. You would think something that cost that much would at least be <i>stable</i>, but I suppose "serious professionals" look at feature sets and not stability.
My experience with GIMP is none, so I'm not exactly qualified to comment, but Photoshop has to be one of the biggest usability nightmares on the market today. There are strange restrictions and ambiguous error messages that don't make any sense for the novice. Once you get more comfortable with Photoshop, you realize the power and flexibility of it, but it takes a while to get there.
As someone that spent a good long while being frustrated by photoshop, I can't imagine GIMP actually being harder to use.
As frustrating and annoying as Photoshop is, GIMP is massively worse usabilty-wise across the board, and then all the features are missing too. It's a lose-lose.
I haven't found a single task where GIMP is less obnoxious. Most of the time I give up -- sometimes I'll try to use ImageMajick or PIL, other times I'll get a Mac or Windows box with Photoshop or Paint.NET
As frustrating and annoying as Photoshop is, GIMP is massively worse usabilty-wise across the board
I can't agree with you on this one. I think you're guilty of believing intuitive means "what I'm used to". We all are to one degree or another, which is why I made a point of mentioning my many years of using GIMP vs. being a beginner with Photoshop. Nonetheless, the learning curve in Photoshop is very steep; I believe steeper and longer than GIMP. Yes, it's definitely a more powerful tool, which is why I bought CS4 recently despite being comfortable with GIMP/Inkscape and able to product most things I've ever needed to produce with just a few minutes of effort (except ai and psd files). But, nonetheless, even just doing basic image editing tasks, Photoshop is pretty hard to use.
I think the only real conclusion we can come to is that complex software is hard to use for beginners.
I didn't even mention the spectre of 'intuitive', much less subscribe to its primal fallacy.
I used GIMP and several generations of Microsoft products (my family had a MSDN subscription) before I figured out Photoshop at all, and the difference is night and dusk (PS is no usability king either, just not dogshit). There's tons of opportunities for improvement over PS, but GIMP takes none of them and instead does a bunch of stupid MDI shit.
Interestingly, I find the opposite holds true for Illustrator/Inkscape -- I am baffled by Illustrator, and have never met someone (even digital art faculty) who could really wrap their head around it, much less show me the way. It's CAD-tool bad! Inkscape is awesome, and not just compared to AI (though for the first several years it was ridiculously unstable).
In the interest of fairness...I just bought Adobe CS4 Web Premium (with Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.). I've been working with the GIMP and Inkscape for a good long while, off and on, and I'm still finding Photoshop and Illustrator to be incredibly hard to use and obtuse. I've been watching video tutorials, reading the docs, searching the web, and tinkering, for a couple of weeks now, and I'm still nowhere near as productive as I am in GIMP or Inkscape. Partly this is just that the Adobe products do more. This is an acceptable cost, to me, but I still find myself feeling grouchy a lot of the time because things do not work as I would expect (not just "as the GIMP or Inkscape would do it", but also in terms of discoverability...for example, sometimes I accidentally break my workspace, or whatever it is called, and can't figure out what I did or how to fix it; you can't undo workspace changes, as far as I know).
Take it all with a grain of salt, as I'm a barely functioning idiot with quite a few products that are supposed to be easy to use. iTunes, for example, is a nightmare for me; I always end up deleting my whole collection either on the device or on the computer or having something else go totally amok and I have to reboot into Linux just to recover all of my data. So, maybe Adobe software is "easy to use" like Apple software is "easy to use", and I'm just an idiot.
Stability of the Adobe stuff also leaves a lot to be desired. It's kinda like Inkscape a couple of years ago, or GIMP ten or twelve years ago (or during the 2.0 beta years). Sometimes weird things happen and it just freezes up. This may be the newer Adobe stuff; I'm usually watching a tutorial video when it happens, so maybe Air or Flex or whatever is to blame, rather than Photoshop or Illustrator. But it happens a lot when I'm watching those videos.