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An important aspect of the non-Nikon lenses (and, to a lesser extent, bodies) is that they fill gaps in the system, making Nikons more useful or more accessible overall.

The rangefinder-era Zunow 50/1.1 pushed the envelope of lens design and was for a time the fastest Nikon-compatible lens available.

More typically, non-Nikkor lenses allow people on a budget to make full use of the Nikon system. For many years now, I've ownded an used a lowly Vivitar 19mm f/3.8 in Nikon SLR mount. It's very small, very light, and cost me about $120. I never used that focal length often and so couldn't justify the cost, size or weight of a Nikon 18mm lens. The Vivitar is weakest at its corners, but that problem disappears in the digital world of 1:1.5 image reduction, where the lens becomes an oft-used 28.5mm equivalent and where slightly soft corners are well outside the image area.

The afore-mentioned Vivitar 35-85/2.8 didn't have a Nikkor equivalent when introduced, and the Vivitar 70-210s were optically comparable to their Nikkor counterparts.

I got involved in the Nikon RF system via a Soviet Kiev. I was in a camera shop in the late 1980s, trying to decide why I wanted to buy this weird old thing -- when the shopowner told me that Nikon used to make lenses in the old Contax RF mount, that's what clinched the decision, because I was using Nikon SLRs at the time. The old Soviet lenses continue to have a remarkable quality-to-size-to-price-to-weight ratio. When I bought a Soviet Jupiter 35.2.8 to use on my then-young Nikon RF system, its quality was surprisingly good enough that I started using it for newspaper work (unbeknownst to my editors). A friend of mine is the chief photographer for a good-sized German daily newspaper, and his workaday lens is a small inexpensive Sigma 18-55 zoom on a Nikon D200 body. He's hard on equipment, and the low price of the Sigma means he doesn't have much angst when he smacks it around and has to buy a new one.

Somewhere or other, I've got a Tokina 400/5.6 -- it's a little soft wide open but indistinguishable from Nikkors at f/8. I've used it for a few pictures, not enough to justify a Nikkor 400mm lens at the time that I bought it, but enough to justify the price of the Tokina. Ditto for a Tokina 17/3.5 that I used to own but gave to a friend when I got the Vivitar 19mm lens. The Tokina was the better lens, but it was gimmicky wide, a focal length I just hardly ever used.

I use Nikons because of their excellent optics. The 85/2 and 50/1/4 sold me on the system. For the longest time, I found that I could shoot any possible subject with four Nikkor primes ... 24/2.8; 50/1.4; 85/2; and 180/2.8. I used non-Nikkors to explore the extremes at either end. And my entry into the 24mm focal length was a serviceable but unspectacular Tokina 24/2.8 that I'd still use today if I hadn't loaned it a colleague who badly scratched it.

I have one of Brian's Helios-103 53/1.8 lenses adapted to the Nikon-S mount. It really does have a special look that can't be dupllicated by other lenses available to Nikon RF photographers. For those who care about out-of-focus rendition, known as "bokeh", it really has no peer -- a a milky smoothness that reminds me of creme and marshmallows melting in a cup of piping hot chocolate. There aren't many $24 lenses around that can make you search that hard for such overwrought descriptive language.