It is nice to here some praise for Unity. Despite the grumbling (mine), I
think that Unity is very good .... for some users. It works best for power
users who like a simple, uncluttered desktop and love hotkeys (there are
lots of them). I don't like to type (despite my long posts here) and do
everything that I can to avoid it. I am very visual so textual material is
harder for me to remember. It is also better for new users who come from a
smartphone or tablet background. It is very intuitive if you do not have to
un-learn past habits. Lots of hard work has gone into Unity in the past year
(less actually) to make it on par with or better than GNOME Shell which had
a big head start. Kudos to Canonical and the team.

I think that it is the future of OSes. OS/X Lion and Windows 8 are similar
experiences. Canonical foresaw this and was quick off the mark.This caught
many (most?) users off guard and they took it as a slight. What? Canonical
was abandoning them? They approached Unity (many and still do) with a
negative attitude. You can't hope to like something if you have already made
up your mind. GNOME 2.x is history. Most users do not want to recognise
that. They blame Ubuntu, but should blame GNOME. When you compare Unity with
GNOME's offering (Shell) then you see that both see the trend towards simple
and scalable interfaces. They can work well on different desktop sizes and a
variety of devices. They are simple and screen reading is kept to a minimum.
Menus are out. Launchers and the Dash are in. Multitasking still works, but
it is much simplified. GNOME Shell works only in full screen, like Android.
Unity allows for more than one window on a single screen, but has the global
menu which confuses things. It is a compromise and that does not work for
me. In trying to keep it simple and clean they have also opted
for disappearing launchers, scroll bars and menus that only show when you
mouse over them. This is more work for the desktop user who has to move the
mouse to the menu when they want to see something and if there are two
windows on the screen you add a click to switch focus. So there is reason to
grumble, but if you can get past it you can see what they are striving for
and be impressed at the achievement.

I am still a KDE user. However, at some point KDE will move in that
direction, too. I hope that they fork it or still allow for different
experiences like they do now with Activities. If you are a netbook user then
you can use a different Activity called Search and Replace instead of the
default desktop. Switching activities is just a mouse click or keystroke
away. You do not have to logout, reboot or install anything. Think of it as
having Unity but being able to press shift-mousewheel on the desktop or
shift-right-click on the desktop and choose Activities from a drop down
menu. Then you could be in a classic desktop. You can't do this in any other
DE that I know of but KDE which is one of many reasons that I love it so
much. I could switch to Unity, but KDE makes is hard when it is so good.