I'm quite happy with GNOME 3 on an 11" MBA. Most things, like browsers running fullscreen, gvim and terminal side-by-side, each taking half of the screen, no need to fuss with resizing and moving windows.

This might not be optimal for large displays and desktop computers, but if with Windows 8 the future of computers looks like [1], then GNOME might have made a very smart move with the shell.

1: http://liliputing.com/2011/12/samsung-series-7-slate-pc-revi...