Can OS X really suck this badly?

I was playing around with Git because that seems to be what the cool kids are doing nowadays, and stumbled onto what seems to be a rather nasty bug in OS X. Apparently, creating a lot of files with names in a random lexical order is reeeeeaaallllyyyy slllooooowwwww. Here's a demo (in Python):

import hashlib, datetime, os
l1 = [hashlib.md5(str(i)).hexdigest() for i in range(3000)]
l2 = [x for x in l1]
l2.sort()

os.mkdir('test')

def test(l):
  t0 = datetime.datetime.now()
  for x in l: open('test/%s' % x, 'w').write('test')
  os.system('sync')
  os.system('rm test/*')
  os.system('sync')
  return datetime.datetime.now()-t0

test(l1)
test(l2)

On Linux, both tests run in about the same amount of time (about a second on my machine). But on OS X, test(l1) is seven times slower than test(l2). This is enough to cause real pain when trying to deal with a large repository because Git uses the filesystem as sort of a poor man's database.

If anyone happens to know a fix for this, or how to get Apple's attention, I would be most grateful. I've reported this to Apple Feedback and also their discussion forums but I'm not holding my breath.