That's true in some areas, but definitely not in others. I've used a variety of media players, and generally speaking the proprietary ones are inferior. VLC, while it is a bit of a resource hog, will play anything you throw at it. Mplayer and Media Player Classic are elegant, fast, and have damn good compatibility.
iTunes and WMP are bloated crap that force you to sit through DVD warnings. WMP has gotten a lot more stable since Windows 7, but that's actually a case where it has taken Microsoft years to come up with anything approaching the usability of VLC. (And their fealty to the MPAA prevents them from taking the final user-friendly step and allowing us to watch what we want to watch on the DVDs we've purchased.)
Chrome is widely regarded as the front-runner among browsers. And to be clear, Google didn't make Chrome because they wanted a free (in both senses of the word) browser. They built it because they wanted a browser that doesn't suck. (Though I guess you could make the argument that KHTML was just a me-too product.)
I don't think Inkscape has any competitors, open or closed. It's an intuitive, full-featured vector graphics editor. Adobe Illustrator by contrast is certainly superior, but it has a learning curve that makes it unusable for people who aren't graphics designers. Inkscape is extremely innovative.
Don't forget Firefox either; while Chrome has taken the lead in many areas, Firefox is still ahead in some (graphics acceleration and JavaScript language features for example), and more importantly, Firefox led the way in terms of innovation for years and years before Chrome was on the scene.
Other open source products I can think of with fantastic UX are Transmission (the BitTorrent client) and Colloquy.
"VLC, while it is a bit of a resource hog, will play anything you throw at it."
I'm not sure that is a victory of OSS as much as it is that they have more freedom to play fast and loose with patents than a commercial/closed source developer would have if directly selling their software (particularly in the US market).
iTunes and WMP are bloated crap that force you to sit through DVD warnings. WMP has gotten a lot more stable since Windows 7, but that's actually a case where it has taken Microsoft years to come up with anything approaching the usability of VLC. (And their fealty to the MPAA prevents them from taking the final user-friendly step and allowing us to watch what we want to watch on the DVDs we've purchased.)
Chrome is widely regarded as the front-runner among browsers. And to be clear, Google didn't make Chrome because they wanted a free (in both senses of the word) browser. They built it because they wanted a browser that doesn't suck. (Though I guess you could make the argument that KHTML was just a me-too product.)
I don't think Inkscape has any competitors, open or closed. It's an intuitive, full-featured vector graphics editor. Adobe Illustrator by contrast is certainly superior, but it has a learning curve that makes it unusable for people who aren't graphics designers. Inkscape is extremely innovative.