Unity's not so bad on my netbook where I mostly just run Firefox on a tiny screen, but on my 11.04 laptop the app-launcher sucks, the 'global menu' sucks and the stupid scrollbars suck.
Did they fix any of those in 11.10? Oh, they can't, because they're broken by design.
The overlay scrollbars have seen improvements in the last release. They don't bother me but I really never touch them anyway since I just scroll with my mouse. To remove them, copy and paste this into your terminal: sudo apt-get remove overlay-scrollbar liboverlay-scrollbar3-0.2-0 liboverlay-scrollbar-0.2-0
I can understand why you would dislike the global menu on a desktop. To remove them, copy this into your terminal: sudo apt-get remove appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-gtk appmenu-qt
There have been some very nice changes made to the application launcher. In my opinion, the top one of these is performance improvement but there are also other changes that make it easier to use such as seeing only applications from certain categories.
I recommend that you try it and then come back here and post about the success or failure of the latest Ubuntu release. Trying it out would lend more credibility to your stated opinion.