The Windows taskbar was radically changed in 7 to turn it into a dock rather than an active windows bar. And the start menu was radically changed twice - the transition to Vista, where they added semantic search, and in 8 when they made it pretty much only semantic search.

I'm confused how that makes Unity "well below these levels" since their meta-key function is effectively a more robust search and their taskbar is a dock, that is just on the side of your screen.

Or Gnome, where their meta functionality is, again, search. And their dock just requires you to hit meta to access, as if its always hidden. And you get window presentation that way.

The only significant loss - and I would agree it is significant, maybe its one of the reasons I use KDE - is the lack of a categorized tree graph of all installed programs, for when you don't know what you want, you don't have it pinned, and need a way to narrow your options down. That doesn't happen easily in Gnome or Unity (you can present applications by group by searching the group) but a novice user wouldn't know that.