When all you get is a spinning cursor during a slow or intensive operation you can't tell what, if any, progress is being made. It would be nice to have some kind of progress bar so you could decide if you want to wait for it to complete or not.
If you decide that you don't want to wait you should be able to interrupt the activity and regain control.
Many times the only alternative is to kill MicroStation and re-open the design file.
While I was writing this post I was waiting for a result from a "measure distance minimum between" command between a small mesh and a rather large mesh. It took about 10 minutes to complete. I would have liked to be able to interrupted the command rather than wait for it to complete.