Not even in the running as long as the Pixelmator developers are philosophically and staunchly opposed to plugins.

What Zink said, plus the biggest bug in the program -- fuzzy reductions -- still not fixed. And yes, they acknowledged it months ago. To coin a phrase, the "focus" of this update wasn't on the right priorities, guys.

UPDATE: I partially retract the above, as the devs acknowledge the issue and say it affects only certain Macs/video cards. They apparently have a fix for those models (you have to email them your specs to get it) -- but I still find it odd that they can't push that fix into a general update -- Adobe doesn't seem to have a problem doing so, just sayin' ...

For nearly $600 more, I'd expect Photoshop to be a better program than Pixelmator, be it plugins or performance.

It's hard for me to beat up a program that's trying to do what a lot of people use Photoshop for in a much more cost effective manner.

I for one like Pixelmator. It has a slick interface and for the most part does the basic things I need. I wasn't aware of the developers' opposition to plugins, but maybe they are a small outfit and trying to keep the code within the limitations of what they can handle. You certainly can't argue about the price.