Does Mac OS X manage registries for installed applications?
There's no registry in Mac OS.
However, you can find most application settings in the Library/Preferences folder. Most apps saves their settings there in separate files. This is not something that's managed by the OS. There's no hive, there's no regedit, nothing like that, Just a bunch of plist files.
One should add that some programs — mainly those with a Unix or Linux background — are likely to store their data in ~/ in a dotted (thus invisible to the Finder) folder or somewhere inside ~/.config .
So, in the end it is not too simple, unfortunately.