Yes, unbelievable but true!... Here's what I submitted to the famous Macintouch site and thankfully it got included in their Mac OS X Reader Reports: Jaguar Part 10:

What drives me nuts is that with the new column view used in all Open/Save dialog boxes, I can't type the first few letters of a file I want to go to. There doesn't seem to be a way to select a specific column to work in. And even for experienced Mac users, seeing only 2 columns at a time and not knowing that you can scroll to the left is frustrating. At this point, I'm thinking Windows Explorer is more user-friendly. Apple needs to improve this.

Also, why no path field in window toolbars? This would make navigation both down and up the directory structure more efficient. Most other GUIs have had this for ages - in Windows it's the "Address Bar" and in Linux's Gnome it's the "Location Bar". This is not the same as Jaguar's "Path" pop-down menu item (or Command-clicking a window title) — with that, you can't just type in a path you might know (e.g. /docs/work/jobs), you can only navigate backwards, and you can't copy any part of the path you're in.

I sure hope Apple is listening and does something about it. I know many others have complained about this same thing.