To me it seems that the new interfaces do not give you as much control. Tweaking Gnome 3, Unity, or KDE4 seems harder than their predecessors and that lack of customization is what is alien to me. Linux is billed as a custom OS I guess that is why their are so many different flavors. When that is taken away you have basically you have something that resembles a Windows environment although I think it's actually easier to customize Windows that any of the desktops mentioned earlier. Perhaps I am jaded or maybe I am just not used to giving up control of my desktop.