In my crusade of boycotting apple production I switched from OS X to ubuntu. And you know what, despite high disregard from HN auditory, I've found Unity to be surprisingly good. For example, unity dock still worse than os x dock, but it's good enough. Single menu for all apps is familiar from os x, although I hit it when attempting to move windows more often than I want to. Application switcher can be navigated with arrows by default, which is good, although I would also like it to be navigatable via mouse too. 'Spotlight-like' menu named Dash Home takes way too much screen estate, but again, it's at least usable. Hotkeys are terrible, though, and first thing I did was disable alt and super keys calling dock/dash-home.
Overall, I like Unity way more than current Gnome, KDE, XFCE and LXDE. Your mileage may vary.
I think, the real linux desktop problems are when something goes wrong. Sometimes updates are unsafe. Sometimes you find a bug in a software. I had 10 or 20 crashes and error report windows in my first day. Commercial software is terrible too. Skype is buggy, crashes often and is just bad. Nvidia binary drivers suck and nouveau crashes on my card (560ti). Twinview can only VSync one screen. Your other screen is doomed to lag on renders. Xinerama has a bug with cursor randomly jumping over to another screen. Whenever something bad happens you resort to google and waste 10 minutes+ for fixing it.
I also think that applications not being made for linux is not a very big deal. 80% use case includes browser, music player and office package. All of which are included by default in most distributions.
I have similar issues myself. It always seems that there are glitches all over the place. I really wish the desktop was as stable as windows (or osx). Don't get me wrong - I like KDE, GNOME, and Unity ... the problem is that they are not that stable. There always seems something that is off.
Overall, I like Unity way more than current Gnome, KDE, XFCE and LXDE. Your mileage may vary.
I think, the real linux desktop problems are when something goes wrong. Sometimes updates are unsafe. Sometimes you find a bug in a software. I had 10 or 20 crashes and error report windows in my first day. Commercial software is terrible too. Skype is buggy, crashes often and is just bad. Nvidia binary drivers suck and nouveau crashes on my card (560ti). Twinview can only VSync one screen. Your other screen is doomed to lag on renders. Xinerama has a bug with cursor randomly jumping over to another screen. Whenever something bad happens you resort to google and waste 10 minutes+ for fixing it.
I also think that applications not being made for linux is not a very big deal. 80% use case includes browser, music player and office package. All of which are included by default in most distributions.