Why are home folders in Mac OS X located in /Users, and not /home?

Solution 1:

While we can only guess on Apple's motivations for certain decisions, the most obvious explanation would be that a "Users" folder has existed since Mac OS 9, before it was a Unix system, and Apple chose to stick with something familiar to their users. The same goes for other already familiar folders like "Applications".

This effectively translates in two different parts of the filesystem, where the not-so-user-friendly Unix hierarchy is hidden from the GUI, and a more friendly folder hierarchy is added on top of that and is exposed in the GUI.

There also is a clear difference in the style of directory names between the visible and invisible part. The invisible part uses all lowercase words as per convention in *nix filesystems, while the exposed part of the filesystem will uppercase the first letter of each word in a folder name.

Solution 2:

No /home/ is the default on Linux but this is not a standard. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_directory#Default_Home_Directory_per_Operating_System for a list of default home directories.