You made an excellent point and seriously, I've said this from the beginning of time and I'll say it again, it's the Apple fanboys that make me hate Apple and their products. It's just like talking to a cult fanatic.
Whenever a user of multiple platforms uses a Mac or any other Apple product and says "This doesn't really make sense", Apple fanboys come and say one of two things: "You don't really need it" or "You've been brainwashed." Well, guess what. As a Windows user, I respect some features that Mac OS X has and wish that Windows might have it. And I'm pretty sure any Windows user would say "I wish Windows would have this." But you talk to a Apple fanboy and tell them Apple might've done it wrong, they can't admit that Apple actually could do something worse than Microsoft and get super defensive. Sorry, but don't identify yourself with Apple that much because Apple just sees you as a consumer.
Back to the original point. You go to a website. You type in a keyword and press enter. What do you expect? You expect an execution. You press tab and your selection cursor moves to the "search" icon. You press enter. What do you expect? You expect an execution. Now, let's say, when doing the same thing in Safari, the default behavior was change text or show properties of the icon. What would you say?
There's a million other ways to prove that Finder is backwards. You go to Terminal and type in a file name and press enter. What do you expect? You expect execution. Because that's most likely behavior to be expected when you select a file--or type a filename, for that matter. If the default behavior of "./filename + return" combination was to rename a file and in order to run the file you actually had to type something like "./filename run + return" that would be called unintuitive because "it adds an extra step for something that you do most often." Selecting a file in Finder is quite the same as typing in a filename and waiting. Pressing the return key to run a file, makes much more sense.
Dear Apple fanboys,
Please do one of two things: either admit you're an Apple fanboy and that you'd buy whatever they sold even if they sold a bag of crap, or accept some constructive common-sense criticism and think for yourself, instead of mindlessly saying "we don't need that."
