I've been an avid Ubuntu user for several years now. I even liked the Unity desktop and have been using that for a long time as well. But after the update to 11.10 there was just to many things wrong with Unity. They made it ~~impossible~~ hard to remove Gwibber and other if their indicator entries. And I couldn't keep ignoring the entries in top of the other bugs and missing features I just to just work around.

So I decided to give Gnome Shell a try, and after using it for about two months I decided it was time to write down some of my impressions with it. My initial impression is that I quite like it. However there are a few things I would like to change. Forgive me if these things have already been reported as bugs and fixed in later versions.

Notifications

I don't understand why some notifications stays persistent on the screen. For instance when a portable drive (usb stick) is inserted it shows a notification that the drive is ready. That notification doesn't disappear until you click either one of the action buttons or the black edge. I would also like to see the possibility to turn of those notifications as they appear every time I boot my laptop at home (as it mounts nfs drives at home)
Chat notifications are very handy. I like that you can keep your conversations in the notifications, but for some reason you can't keep them persistent and one wrong click and it opens the empathy window instead. I would like the ability to keep my conversations in those notifications.

Chat

I would love to see even deeper integration between gnome shell and empathy (chat). For instance you can search for contacts from empathy in the Activities, but you can't initiate a chat with that person... You can only see their contact details (even though you can see their online status) That just seems inconsistent.
I would also love to see the ability with keeping chats in the notifications described above.

Activities

It would be nice with better navigation between searched items in the Activities view. Once you searched for something partly and a few suggestions remain, it's not always obvious that only the up/down arrow keys can be used to navigate horizontally between suggestions.

Google

As I'm a Google fanboy, I would like to see even deeper integration with google products such as documents, gmail and calendar. READ: Please get rid of the dependency on evolution to be able to sync google calendars to the calendar widget.

Having listed some of the things I would really love to see in Gnome Shell, I have to say I'm quite impressed with how well it works and how stable it is. It's pleasant to use and doesn't have all the small annoyances in Unity. Ok, to be fair, it has a few things that gets a bit annoying (see above) but overall it just feels more finished than Unity.