windows explorer has had that feature for years as well

Yes, I believe I was performing searches from the Start menu in Windows back in the 90s, but it was always horribly slow and still missed results. Ever since I got a Macbook in 2006 I've enjoyed instant results from Spotlight--I mean within 1 or sometimes 2 seconds, not 5 minutes!

Start, type, search results. Its had that since vista!

It's not nearly as fast, by at least an order of magnitude. Also, because there is no centralized location for apps to be stored (e.g. /Applications) it has a harder time succeeding as an app launcher.

I can't tell the difference in speed between a 2007 Lenovo T61 and a 2010 MBP.

Works fine for apps. Windows 8 actually makes distinction between documents, apps and settings.

It never worked well for me, but I kill my search indexer process a lot because it turns my fan on.

Never had that problem!

And yet "locate" is banned by default.

Because it's redundant. man mdfind

If you want, of course, you can turn on locate, but it seems strange to have two local indexing things.

10 yeas on, I have never finished waiting for Spotlight to index my drive and serve a query.