It is a good desktop environment. It has a reputation for being lightweight
and highly configurable, although it is not as lightweight as it once was.
It should fill the gap nicely for many people. Move the panel to the top
and it is a good knock off. Does running Nautilus still cause problems? It
used to before 11.10. It will replace the XFCE desktop with GNOME's because
Nautilus is not just a file manager but a partial window manager as well. I
think but have not tried it, that 11.10 fixed that.