I disagree that linux is much better than OSX in this regard. Homebrew is really amazing, and while it can't help you configure an entire system, it is pretty compelling.
It does two things very well that ubuntu's apt-get doesn't:
1) consistently has the latest versions of your software
2) handles programming languages very well (that is to say, it makes you use rvm, pip, cpan, etc, instead of packaging _any_ libraries).
Those are not ideal for everybody or every system, but it's a damn fine experience for developers' machines.
I love homebrew - but that isn't OS X. It's a third-party package manager. And is also useless for identifying files you install from the App Store. For better or worse, on Ubuntu, my packages are tracked through dpkg (and, 95% of the time, I just do a sudo apt-get install) - contrawise, on an RHEL system, we've all agreed to track our package with rpm (or sudo yum install).
No such universally agreed upon metaphor exists on OS X. They didn't provide a universal package management mechanism. In many cases, you just drag the package into your Applications directory and it's "Installed."
Right, but I think this is why it's great. Apt has a lot of disadvantages because it's the only option. By contrast, OSX had fink, and macports, and now homebrew. If Fink had been designated the winner back then, there would have been no competition, and homebrew would never have come out.
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.
It does two things very well that ubuntu's apt-get doesn't:
1) consistently has the latest versions of your software 2) handles programming languages very well (that is to say, it makes you use rvm, pip, cpan, etc, instead of packaging _any_ libraries).
Those are not ideal for everybody or every system, but it's a damn fine experience for developers' machines.