I think that we need lots more information and some experience with Unity in
Natty because it takes time to get used to a new way of working before we
judge. Change is unavoidable. GNOME 2.x has been around for over a decade
and it is near the end of its life. You therefore can choose between Unity
and GNOME Shell. Both are radically different, but GNOME Shell is more
different because Unity has been around for a couple of years in UNE. Unity
gives users a of Ubuntu a choice that users of other distributions do not
have. They must accept GNOME Shell or seek another DE such as KDE or XFCE.
So however, we look at it we have to acknowledge that Ubuntu users are ahead
and not behind.

Unity gives Canonical the control that it wanted. When Ubuntu came along
GNOME was well established and under the control of Novell. It has never
been a happy relationship. As Ubuntu grew in popularity there was always
lots of whining that Ubuntu should be giving more back. Breaking with GNOME
was inevitable for those who have followed this soap opera. Now Ubuntu is
free of GNOME and can rise or fall on its own merits. They still need to
work with Debian and things are much better between the two distributions,
although not perfect.

We need to be mindful when judging decisions made that things are more
complicated than just change for change's sake. The change part was
inevitable. It is just a question of which direction to go. They chose
something that is theirs and something that nobody else has and that can't
be bad.

Maybe there will be yet another *buntu. Ubuntu with GNOME Shell. Lots of
this depends on acceptance of Unity which I feel will be performance based
and not feature based. Will Unity be fast enough? There is a side issue to
this discussion as well. Until Ubuntu announced plans to use Unity, Compiz
had not place to go because it does not work with GNOME Shell. So Unity is
keeping Compiz alive and Canonical is paying its developers.

The other big story is that of Wayland. With Natty, Wayland will appear in
the repositories for the first time, although Natty will not use it, so
users can play around with the next big thing.