This has been covered in other places, but it can be annoying to only be able to copy and paste line-wise. It can be particularly annoying when you just want to yank a single word to do a web search or similar. Luckily, Vim can use external utilities on many systems to access the clipboard with a system call: "+ and "* are supposed to 'do the right thing', but there isn't any such integration with OS X, and I have simply had complete failure with ubuntu (even with +xterm_clipboard +clipboard +X11). Though, it has been reported to work fine on Ubuntu 8.04 with default packages (vim 7.1-138).