Control Strip was less for tasks, more for easy access to things that were controllable with Control Panels.
Logically: without the strip, these types of control would have belonged at the top of the screen, to the right of the menu bar. The bar was minimalist, so we gained a collapsible, movable strip that was popularly at bottom left – where it was least likely to interfere with elements of windows.
I think of Launcher as a predecessor to (2011) Launchpad, mainly because Launcher and Launchpad grouped things in a way that Dock could not.
Dock was the first thing that really split the UI into top/bottom.
Years after abandoning Mac OS X: I still prefer things at top left, and a global menu bar.