Awesome analogy about context switching. It's definitely true. The "unix philosophy" never really worked well for GUIs and that's been a big problem for composability.
Interestingly, the Unix philosophy works great in machine to machine communications. It is pretty excellent at handling the needs of the IoT and distributed systems, networks, sensors, etc. You hit the nail on the head about GUIs.
Ironically, it is the "handoff" features that Apple was traditionally best at. BUT, I have this feeling that most of what we hate can be described as "too little, too soon". After all, it could be argued that Apple is aiming for an environment which is "document focused" with their focus on standardized APIs (Adobe is working on this, too), but none of this works yet, because software is still written from an "Apps" POV. In the real world, we change the tool relative to the job, and the best tools are specific single tasks. given the experience so far, I'm far from convinced that a 2D GUI should ever try duplicate that.
