Discovering Homebrew was wonderful after suffering the broken-by-design ports systems of Fink and Macports (a retrograde step from Darwin Ports). But it is not really strong competition for Debian's APT. For example, a day after first using Homebrew, I discovered that the Qt port simply didn't work. I fairly frequently have to install by hand software for OSX that has stable packages in Debian.
It's also true that Homebrew (and Macports, but not Fink) are doing something fundamentally less ambitious than the main Linux package managers: it offers a simple dependency system and scripting for compiling stuff, not directly installing the end product.
It's also true that Homebrew (and Macports, but not Fink) are doing something fundamentally less ambitious than the main Linux package managers: it offers a simple dependency system and scripting for compiling stuff, not directly installing the end product.