Window tiling

I know in expose F9 will spread out all open windows on the desktop. However, is there a way to keep them spread out so that you can actually type in them, rather than the default of clicking one and having it pop to the front--hiding all the rest? I know Windoze can do this, so I presume/hope OS X can.

Expose won't allow you to do that. It is more or less designed to allow you to cycle through or sort through windows and apps.
You could manually move your windows around so you can see all of them, but Expose will not let you do that.