Will first of all join the in the congrats in moving over to Mac from Windows. Remember making the move, with a fair amount of nervousness, a few years ago. In retrospect, most of the problems in the move were because I was trying too hard after years of conditioning with Windows. When I relaxed and trusted the Mac to do the job right a lot of the problems went away. Maybe this is a bit of a trite observation, but I will say once over the teething problems I will be very surprised if you look back.
As for your email program, why use Entourage? Started with Mail and quite frankly does the job beautifully. Think that is the good thing about most Mac programs, just focused on one task and do it well.
Good point about Finder turning its nose up at .exe files is that this automatically removes one major source of virus etc type nasties getting onto your computer.
