I disagree that the OS 9 GUI is better than OS X 10.1
It is definately not as polished as OS 9. for example mounted volumes from Samba shares or NFS shares aren't updated in X.1 they are in 9. You have to dismount the Volume and remount it before change you have made to that drive are seen i.e new files.
I love X.1 but the GUI needs maturing. The major problem with linux is that there isn't a standard GUI and the available GUI's aren't as polished as Mac OS (X or 9) or windows or even CDE.
when I'm doing backend stuff I can still use Java for servlets and JSP (an area where Java really signs is server side stuff).
See this is where I have to say Java is inapproprate. Servers are supposed to be the best they can be. Efficient little beasties that can churn out their stuff as fast as possible. Java is not the obvious choice. Interactive stuff you could argue the case. Server's nahhhhhh.