Gnome 3 is the best desktop environment I've ever used - my comment history on HN over the past 5 years definitely indicates as much. I'm not going to claim I've used all of them, but compared to what I've seen in Unity, macOS, and various versions of Windows (except Windows 10, which I have not tried), it's modern, fluid, and intuitive. To see Gnome return to the fold of Ubuntu is a huge deal to me and I couldn't be happier or more excited on this decision. Shuttleworth deserves a lot of praise and admiration for taking this bold (and likely painful) path.
(On a related note, I was reading up on Apple's switch from PowerPC to Intel earlier today, and it feels very familiar to this.)