I guess you're right about the idea being mac-centric - the cross-platform option would be to implement generic API event-hooks for everybody to exploit.
I guess we all play the game a little different. On my old IBM I used a lot of time fast-forwarding to the next event as you suggest. No down-time going from battle-scape to battle-scape.
Sometimes with dos-box I usually had the original game running next to, say, word processors, excel-sheets, eclipse, mail-clients and a couple of webbrowsers. I used the time between UFO-events to get things done.
You could argue that the reason for keeping the time adjustable in the game is to let people do just that kind of multi-tasking; If everybody should play the game by fastforwarding to the next event, why not just remove the clock and install a 'Next Event' button?
Thx for listening