Unity and so be it

Is this a flame? Maybe. But I support Canonical's decision to use Unity instead Gnome Shell. Why? Because this "fork" is fundamental, not just for usability reasons, but mainly because it's a strong stance from the most widespread GNU/Linux distribution. Adopting Unity, Canonical did some decisions, oriented both to usability and development. Choosing Unity, Canonical show us its direction: the underlying technology is useless if user experience is poor. KDE 4 is on this way: great technology (C++, QT, Plasma, Phonon, ecc.) but the resulting desktop is not "sexy" as Gnome on Ubuntu.
Technology can't be the objective. Christopher Tozzi said

«GNOME Shell introduces a number of innovative interface concepts that, if successful, could truly redefine the way users interact with their operating system.
Unity, meanwhile, is an interface developed by Canonical that borrows many of its ideas from GNOME Shell. Canonical began work on Unity last spring, and introduced it as the default interface for Ubuntu Netbook Edition in the Ubuntu 10.10 release, which debuted a few weeks ago.»

I put emphasis on some statements, expecially about "to borrow ideas": this is the base of Free Software, which is not (as many thinks) a "Hippy-Programmers Way of Life". Free Software is much more near to "Ideal Market" and "Concurrency" than other realities (such as Apple and Microsoft). Same ideas are implemented by different teams in different ways (e.g. EMACS vs VIM; Eclipse vs Netbeans; Gnome vs KDE; Firefox vs Konqueror and so on). This environment allows to many competitors to survive. But Canonical must monetize its work. And to do this it needs to follows user's desires. If Gnome shell isn't actractive enough, then welcome Unity.