Look, I agree that it takes courage to stuff that's considered 'ground-breaking' by others, I do give the guys at Ubuntu respect for that. However consider the following
1) They went the Unity way and alienated all the users like me who use Linux because every single fucking thing is customizable. Not that Unity is not customizable at all, it's just that in terms of customizability it was a horrible, horrible regression. Also, for some insane reason, Ubuntu has become increasingly slow and bloated, I realized this when I made the switch to Arch Linux, on the recommendation of a friend.
2) They make decisions that increasingly cater to users who have just switched over from windows, hoping to give them a similar experience in order to enable painless migration. WAIT. "The same experience?" Seriously? They're running away from the windows experience for heaven's sake. Blow their minds, that's what you're supposed to do.
3) This is my personal belief, I may be wrong, but I think Linux will always remain an OS for the 2%, maybe at most the 5%. Why? Because most people don't want to spend time tweaking their OS, they see it as a waste of time. If Ubuntu keeps trying to cater to these users, trying to make them "switch-over" and thereby alienate their "power-users", I don't see them surviving.
I've tried all the latest releases from the Ubuntu stable, I quadruple boot with Arch as my main OS, I've got Windows 7, OpenSuse and Ubuntu lying around on the other partitions. I currently prefer Ubuntu the least, I'm not kidding, I even like Win7 more. I've been using linux for over 8 years now. I loved Ubuntu at around the time of Hardy Heron. I hate to see the general direction in which they're headed at the moment.