Edit: I am referring to this http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/09/22/1319216/ubuntu-will-n...
I haven't seen them first hand, but I was hoping someone might give their opinion here.
Aside from that, I'm pretty disappointed with the desktop environment. It's pretty but managing windows is a pain (can't easily alt-tab into a specific terminal window, for instance; it also hijacks Alt key to enable menu item search). I'm looking to replace it soon, but then again I'm probably not the user Ubuntu is primarily targeting these days.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-am...
To be honest, I found the ads to be quite annoying, I usually start applications by pressing the Super key and then typing the name. I don't see how showing Amazon search results for "terminal" or "chrome" are relevant.
I am happy that they accept donations on the download page now. Hopefully this will reduce the need for such experiments.