So it's been a little over two months since Ubuntu 11.10 landed (October 13th, if you're keeping track, which I clearly am), and I figured it was worth checking back in on the whole Unity thing now that the initial screaming has died down a bit. Short version: it hasn't died down nearly as much as Canonical probably hoped.
I've been running Oneiric Ocelot on my main desktop since release week and on an old ThinkPad since about mid-November, and the experience is genuinely different depending on the hardware, which is part of the problem nobody talks about enough. The desktop has a halfway decent Nvidia card so I get full Unity with all the effects. The ThinkPad has some ancient Intel graphics chip that can't keep up, so it kicks me into Unity 2D, which looks similar but behaves just different enough to be annoying. Little things, like the launcher auto-hide timing feeling off, or alt-tab behaving slightly differently. It's not broken. It's just not the same product, and I don't think that's obvious to a regular person reading "Ubuntu 11.10" on a download page.
The actual sticking points from October are still the sticking points now. The global menu bar (the thing where the app menu lives up at the top of the screen instead of in the app's own window) is either something you adapt to in about three days or something you hate for the rest of your life, and there doesn't seem to be much middle ground. I adapted. My roommate did not, and now just runs everything maximized so it stops mattering. That's not really a fix, that's a workaround for a workaround.
The bigger complaint, and I think the more legitimate one, is that 11.10 finally dropped the classic GNOME fallback as a real first-class option the way 11.04 sort of let you keep it around. You can still get a fallback session if you dig for it, but it's clearly not where Canonical wants you, and it shows. If your machine can't handle Unity's effects and you don't want Unity 2D either, you're kind of stuck poking at settings that feel half-abandoned.
What's interesting is watching where people actually went instead of just complaining on forums. A friend of mine ditched Ubuntu entirely a few weeks back and switched to Linux Mint 12, which came out right before Thanksgiving and ships their own layer on top of GNOME Shell (they call it MGSE) specifically to make it look and behave more like a traditional desktop with a bottom panel and a proper start-menu-style thing. He's been pretty happy with it, which says something. Not that Unity is unusable, but that there was real demand for "just give me something that behaves like it's 2009" and Canonical wasn't the one who filled it.
On the plus side, because I try not to be only negative here: the Dash is genuinely fast now, faster than it was even at release, and typing to launch an app has become second nature to me in a way clicking through menus never was. The Ubuntu Software Center still looks nice. Multi-monitor support, which was rough for me in 11.04, has been fine on this setup. And a lot of the little visual polish, animations, the launcher icons, does look more finished than it did two months ago, whether that's actual bug fixes or just me getting used to it, I honestly can't tell anymore.
Unrelated tangent, but since I'm already complaining about interfaces: whoever decided Firefox's tab bar should keep shrinking tabs down to icon-only nubs the moment you open more than about nine of them needs to sit in a room and think about what they did. I have twenty-three tabs open right now. I can identify maybe four of them by favicon alone. Not a Unity problem, just a me problem, but it's been bugging me all week and I needed to say it somewhere.
Anyway. Two months in, my take hasn't moved much from where it was in October: Unity is not the disaster the comment sections made it out to be, but it's also not something Canonical can claim people have "gotten used to" across the board. Some of us did. A meaningful chunk clearly didn't, and went and found Mint or stuck with an older release instead. I'm sticking it out on Oneiric for now, mostly out of stubbornness at this point, and I'll probably feel differently again once 12.04 shows up next spring.