Nice straw man. I advocate better software, not more software.
find, locate, dir /s and the horrendous file search in Windows XP (I haven't used Vista) are not solutions for most users. Under what circumstances are Spotlight, Google Desktop Search and Windows Desktop Search context aware? If I'm in MS Word will any of these tools show Word documents before other types of documents? If I'm using a browser will they perform a web search?
It wasn't meant as a straw man. Better software is only going to happen in addition to software that exists already - i.e. more software, leading to (I suggest) more complexity.
Filesystems work. At least, Windows simple filesystems work, Linux's mess is less pleasant. People who want to can learn to put files in My Documents and find them later - it's not massively complex, there's a place for shared documents, a place for your documents, a place for Programs and a place for Windows. That's about all you need to care about.
At some point I object to the "Why should people learn anything? It's all the failings of the computer!!!!" attitude of your comment - there's always a trade off - any alternative will come with alternative problems. A more complex system (e.g. context awareness) will have more complex problems with it.
I often wish for more context awareness in software, but when I stop and try to visualise it in detail, it seems much less desirable.
find, locate, dir /s and the horrendous file search in Windows XP (I haven't used Vista) are not solutions for most users. Under what circumstances are Spotlight, Google Desktop Search and Windows Desktop Search context aware? If I'm in MS Word will any of these tools show Word documents before other types of documents? If I'm using a browser will they perform a web search?