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The Finder is a Carbon app, so Morgan is correct to classify Carbon apps as full citizens of Mac OS X.
Carbon is the OS X implementation of the Mac OS 9 APIs which are consistent with the runtime environment of OS X and which Apple had the time to move forward. Carbon apps don't take advantage of the Next Step framework and Objective C.
CarbonLib is a library which allows an application written to the Carbon API for OS X to run on OS 8.6 to 9.x. It adds some to the memory requirements, and for a while significantly added to the instability of an application, but Apple beat down most of those bugs, or provided work arounds.
Carbon helped us clear a bunch of bugs out of Internet Explorer, so Carbonizing an application can really help the OS 9 version if you do it right (hence the release of IE 5.1 for OS 8/9, which doesn't require CarbonLib).
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