Meh, its a text editor. Remember, Windows has Notepad and Wordpad, and Notepad is a basic text editor while Word Pad is more featured. TextEdit is apparently more like Wordpad than Notepad....which means OSX is lacking a basic text editor.
gEdit, on the other hand, does both equally well (and poorly).
Unless you expect the common user to drop into the terminal and start typing commands again like its 1987. I use nano, but at that point, whether using nano or vim, why use OSX instead of linux?
I booted back into Linux because OSX seems to fail me more often than not lately anyway, and this was just another example. The only reason I even use OSX anymore is because Cisco's AnyConnect client for Linux doesn't work with my work VPN. I was doing something in OSX for work, disconnected, and figured "Meh, I'll just look at this CSV file here instead of rebooting." My mistake.
The problem with downloading a program to handle basic text editing? Why should I have to? Every other operating system has a built in, GUI based text editor that handles things like not text-wrapping.
In fact, there are like 3 features a text editor NEEDS:
1. Open text files
2. Save text files
3. Don't format text files
To default to format a text file in some way other than the way the file exists on my disk is irresponsible. To not allow me to view it as it sits on my disk is reprehensible.