The one and only workaround is "don't use fullscreen mode" so it definitely isn't going to let you run 2 apps full-screen because it's not going to let you run any application alongside a fullscreen one in the first place.

> something Windows does without any issues whatsoever

That is not entirely true, depending how the fullscreened application is coded interacting with the other one may e.g. make the windows toolbar reappear, or (very common for games) minimize the fullscreen application.

I really wish Windows apps had more consistency in their fullscreen behavior. Sometimes they bring up the taskbar, sometimes they behave like normal windows, sometimes they don't even let you scroll off the side anyway. This last behavior is most annoying in strategy games when I'm scrolling the map and have to use the arrow keys for one of the directions, but equally annoying in some FPS games where the cursor scrolls off the side but still behaves normally until you click to fire and then the application loses focus.

I'm not even a Mac user but I would take a consistent but irritating behavior over an inconsistent and also irritating behavior. It's more inconvenient to have to disable my second monitor while I'm playing a game.

I've found that Dota2 has a very good implementation for multi-monitor behavior. When you're in a menu or waiting to find a game in queue, you can move your mouse off to the second monitor, and click on something and the game will minimize. When you're in game, the game captures the cursor, and doesn't let it move to the second screen unless you alt-tab out of the game window.

That's the source engine default behavior and it works really well. Even better when running in window mode with no borders.

The workaround for now is to just run both applications maximized and deal with the small amount of taskbar clutter at the top.

Drag out the windows by hand to as large as you like, good enough.

This is downvoted, but I think there's some smartness to it.

My experience with the Mac is that apps for it are more often geared to work in not-full-screen windows; my personal hypothesis (with absolutely no documentation or backing) is that more Windows apps are most comfortable to use when maximized (and thus many new-from-Windows users look for a maximization button) because of MS-DOS' full-screen ancestry. In support of this unsupported theory: many more Mac apps seem to look silly when resized to unexpectedly large dimensions than do Windows apps.

Full-screen apps in Lion are a bit of a different thing because they exist in a conceptually separate place from "maximized" windows — they are to the side of the desktop, not on top of it.

Does Windows even have something akin to the full screen mode that is provided in Lion/Mountain Lion? Because as a long time Windows user and recent Mac switcher I am not familiar with it.

On the Mac you can run multiple windows and have them all maximised to take up the maximum amount of screen real estate + applicable chrome.

Some Windows apps have supported this via F11 for a very long time (ten years at least?).

So it is not an OS wide feature like Mac OS X where implementing it is fairly simple (at least from my experience).

Some apps like VLC have supported full screen for years, even before this feature was brought to Mac OS X itself.

So I wouldn't say that Windows has something akin to what is available to on Mac OS X.

Windows might not, but KDE certainly does. It lets you make any window full screen, which gets rid of the borders and makes it take up the whole screen (whichever one it happens to be on). Moreover, it also lets different programs customize their full-screen behavior: for example, Chrome and the Dragon Video Player both have their own full-screen modes.

And this still lets you use all of your screens. It's great.

Xmonad or others do the same. The open source window managers have always had advanced features that would confuse a lot of people.

I could see something like XMonad confusing people just because it's so different.

But KDE? Not so much. It's designed to be elegant and easy to use, and I think it's fairly successful. It's actually rather easy to go from Windows to KDE--even easier than Windows to OS X, I think. (Admittedly, this is in large part because KDE is similar to Windows in a lot of ways.)

Also, full screen isn't a confusing feature :P. And, of course, Apple is just as happy to confuse people as anybody else--it seems half their users are vague on what exactly the green button does!