When comparing Quicksilver vs OS X Launchpad, the Slant community recommends Quicksilver for most people. In the question“What are the best app launchers for Mac OS X?” Quicksilver is ranked 3rd while OS X Launchpad is ranked 4th.
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Pros
Pro Easy-to-understand noun-verb paradigm for creating tasks
Pro A lot more powerful than Spotlight
Pro Makes it really fast to do a lot of actions
There are customizable triggers and capability to execute multilevel commands - e.g. launch terminal app, give the location of script and supply parameters for the script with one command.
Pro Vast extensibility via plugins
A lot of different plugins for browsers, file systems, mail clients, etc.
Pro Free
Built-in to OS X.
Pro Can add application collections
Pro Design, fade-in animation effect
Pro Searchable
Just start typing to narrow down your search.
Cons
Con All apps are automatically included, even uninstallers
Con Limited configurability
You can customize a keyboard shortcut to Launchpad but that's about it.
Con Organize and ordering applications is a nightmare
App organisation in Launchpad is the same as the iPad. You can only move one app at a time, if you drop an app on a full page, it will offset all the icons on the pages to the right. As the total of apps could be very important, as all bundles are automatically added by the app, you have to drag each app icon, one after the other, and scroll through the pages, to put it in the wanted location. The difference with the iPad, is that on the iPad this can be done with iTunes.