Characteristics of Unity and Gnome3 for the End User

Solution 1:

• I think that Gnome Shell is a little more comfortable to navigate with the mouse only. It does have keyboard shortcuts too, and they work well, but I think Unity is a little better in that regard. Both are quite nice.
• With Unity 2D being a real alternative and not just a fallback mode, it means that you can have a more consistent UI across different kinds of computers. It's also usable with a terminal server like NX, which Gnome shell is not.
• The graphics in Gnome Shell seems to be a little more mature than Unity. It's somewhat snappier, although Unity has come a long way during the past months and it quite nice too.
• The big one for me, is Zeitgeist. Unity has integrated it in a beautiful way. Your system seems to learn from your actions and become faster with time. It's designed in a way that seems to welcome many different lenses and scopes, and I think it'll be very useful. I'm sure Gnome Shell will get this too, but Unity is a few laps ahead in this respect.