It's not just Unity/Gnome 3 that's making me think of leaving Ubuntu, I
just didn't want to make an already fairly long email even longer :-)

There's a conflict of philosophies between me and the current direction
Canonical seems to be going in. I could be wrong; I could be misreading
Canonical's intentions. But there are several things going on at the
moment that I have problems with. Most of these - the reluctance to
submit their code to Gnome, the whole Ubuntu Music Store/Banshee fiasco,
the apparent assumption that all Ubuntu users are clueless and need to
have all their thinking done for them amongst other things - I could
live with, just about.

But I'm afraid that, for me, Unity was one step too far. And then the
decision to axe Synaptic - OK, Software Centre will provide most of the
functionality and will even allow you to install Synaptic, but there's
hardly a day goes by when I don't use Synaptic for something - just
confirmed to me that it was time to start looking elsewhere.