Unfortunately that seems to be the direction Ubuntu has been leaning in for the past few releases. It's too bad that the PPA system, for all its benefits, almost forces one to do distro upgrades--it's a choice between having new versions of critical software like Firefox and accepting immature stuff like Unity, or using out-of-date software for another 6 months.
Can you imagine being stuck with FF3.6 till October if you choose not to upgrade to 11.04? (And yes you could add a PPA, but they're often hard to find, and many popular programs don't have PPAs for out-of-release updates.) But that's more of a complaint about the milestone-release system than it is a complaint about Unity.
Though I am glad they're providing the option for Classic, at least in 11.04. Too bad most people who don't like Unity and don't read Linux forums won't figure out how to enable it!