Personally, out of 3 machines (Early 2011 MBP w/ aftermarket SSD upgrade, Late 2012 Mac Mini running Server, and a full-custom mid-tower build), I have not experienced any persistent beach-balling with Mavericks. Granted, I also run pretty vanilla installations, with no 3rd party kernel extensions (exception being the custom-build, of course).
That being said, beach-balling like what is being described here could very well be due to I/O Blocking; a read or write system call must complete before a process can resume and if there is a delay you will see a spinning beach ball.
MacOS X has, for some time, shipped with a handful of tools which may shed some light on this issue: DTrace Scripts. They are found in /usr/bin, and typically have some descriptive name with a .d suffix. Some of the pertinent ones are:
iofile.d - Reports on I/O Wait Time by File and Process requesting access.
hotspot.d - Aggregates disk accesses by location, presenting a histogram output. This is useful for finding particular "hot-spots" that are frequently being accessed.
iosnoop - Reports in real-time all device-level I/O requests. Run this with the -o option to see the amount of time for each request to complete.
cpu_profiler.d - This is like the "Sample Process" option in Activity Monitor, but runs globally sampling all processes, including the kernel. By default, this will dump every stacktrace of every aggregate sample, which is a lot of data. You can restrict to the top N most frequent hits by passing the option "-c N".
If I were in the position of others and experiencing frequent spinning beachballs, I would run some of these scripts to catch one of these beachballs and check the output for some clues on any potential excessive I/O Waits.