Well - I would have preferred a "good enough" package management system to the "best" system. Also - Fink, too, wasn't OS X - yet another third party system.
There is some room for improvement, in the early days, RHEL had a horrendous repository-interface system called "up2date" which was anything but. I think a lot of the uptake in debian systems, such as ubuntu, was that apt-get was so much better than up2date - which seemed to have never been updated after the initial release. Thankfully, yum came about, and now RPM based systems have basic parity with DEB system in terms of package retrieval.
The Net-Net though, is that Linux package management is fairly well defined, but hop onto any OS X system, and try and find out what package a random file belongs to, is basically hopeless.
I'm not bothered by the fact that it isn't built in. What matters is the quality - ubuntu package management can be poor in some areas, and those are areas at which homebrew excels.
Also, homebrew has a significantly easier project - OSX+homebrew is almost solely aimed at devs wanted a good experience around their dev environment. By contrast, ubuntu's packaging relies on it doing everything, making it suck for some things.
There is some room for improvement, in the early days, RHEL had a horrendous repository-interface system called "up2date" which was anything but. I think a lot of the uptake in debian systems, such as ubuntu, was that apt-get was so much better than up2date - which seemed to have never been updated after the initial release. Thankfully, yum came about, and now RPM based systems have basic parity with DEB system in terms of package retrieval.
The Net-Net though, is that Linux package management is fairly well defined, but hop onto any OS X system, and try and find out what package a random file belongs to, is basically hopeless.