May I suggest you look into "Hot Corners", which is built into OS X and allows you to specify certain actions when moving the mouse to the very corner of the screen.
I heavily use the gestures, but I still find these rather handy
My setup is;
Top Left: Show Desktop
Top Right: Expose (on Lion, Mission Control)
Bottom Left: Blank Screen (without sleeping)
Bottom Right: Screensaver
Hot corners seem like a terrible idea, simply because they're far too easy to acquire (by Fitts' Law). I don't want Expose or whatever to show up every single time I move my mouse to the top right corner, which is often accidentally.
I've had this setup for years now, and never accidentally done this.
Don't forget on a Mac you're much less often moving your mouse to the top right corner (window closing is on the top left of a window.
The further most icons are always the Apple on the left, and Spotlight on the right. Both of which I rarely open by hand. If I'm using Spotlight it's always by keyboard command Cmd-Space (though often I use Alfred instead).
And at least on a Laptop I rarely need to shutdown the Mac, which is all I'd use the Apple menu for. Though again, anything I'd go to that menu for I use Alfred for instead.
May be worth turning it on and see how you get on with it?
I heavily use the gestures, but I still find these rather handy
My setup is; Top Left: Show Desktop Top Right: Expose (on Lion, Mission Control) Bottom Left: Blank Screen (without sleeping) Bottom Right: Screensaver