I wish it worked that well for me. (It evidently works that well for my girlfriend, a Mac user.)
But no, I don't want to manage my own music. I want, for instance, all the duplicates to go away. I want podcasts that failed to download properly and are now missing to be able to be refreshed without a bizare and undocumented shift triangle-click shift-click trick (no menu option to achieve the same!). I want my music to play every time I click on it without having to turn iTunes off and on. I want it to work with Windows Remote Desktop like every other piece of music software I've got. I want a useful search UI, instead of the stateful UI that we've got that can only search either library or store. I want to be able to flag a long audio file as "podcast" so that it can remember my place and resume without having to set up my own feed to make that happen.
You can do the last one by right-clicking and picking "Get Info." There's an option called "remember playback position"; check it and it should work.
How often do you have to do an advances search? For ones you do often, just make a smart playlist. Otherwise, what kinds of searches don't work easily with a simple fast text search? I'm curious.
As for the other stuff: iTunes on Windows is bad. I think it's better than some other media players (though I've heard WinAmp is better), but it's not particularly good. On a Mac, though, it's very fast. In my 50GB library, it searches near-instantly, and I really can't think of any time I've had a problem with it. So I can absolutely understand your complaint with the Windows version, and I hope they fix it, but on the Mac it's really a good program. (Good enough that no competitors have seen fit to exist, anyway, not counting the ultra-experimental Songbird.)
But no, I don't want to manage my own music. I want, for instance, all the duplicates to go away. I want podcasts that failed to download properly and are now missing to be able to be refreshed without a bizare and undocumented shift triangle-click shift-click trick (no menu option to achieve the same!). I want my music to play every time I click on it without having to turn iTunes off and on. I want it to work with Windows Remote Desktop like every other piece of music software I've got. I want a useful search UI, instead of the stateful UI that we've got that can only search either library or store. I want to be able to flag a long audio file as "podcast" so that it can remember my place and resume without having to set up my own feed to make that happen.