Personal experience with both Gnome3 and KDE (Score 4, Interesting)

I use both on a dual head box, and appreciate them for entirely different reasons. On any given week I'll switch between the environments a few times, usually at the start of a new task. I find that the context switch is refreshing and helps productivity.

Many of us are aware of KDE's strengths.. for me, configurability, familiarity, visual appeal, stability and speed. One can make the interface visually dense and informative. Scrolling cpu/memory/network stats, rotating yawp weather reports, and various application status indicators are on my desktop.

Gnome3 removes me from this. I love the way it dynamically manages the virtual desktops, and the clean 'distraction-free' environment. I feel like I can reach 'flow' easier here. Simply hitting the 'windows' key or snapping the mouse to the top-left corner to visually see the desktops and their running applications, dragging my emacs or xterm sessions around as needed. It gives me a different and visual way to logically organize and partition the tasks at hand. Yes, KDE and Unity both support these features, too, but in my experience they're not quite as clean. Also, Gnome3's notifications system is brilliant, and I'm looking forward to the enhancements found in 3.6.

While many of the complaints of Gnome3 are valid, I do appreciate that Gnome has had the courage to try something different and controversial. It works for me.