Notice that the launcher bar hides itself when an application tries to fill that part of the screen.

Under the Unity desktop, standard GNOME/GTK applications display their menus in the Top Bar, separate from their application windows.

As I have mentioned before, a single Macintosh-style menu bar works well on small displays, but on larger displays with many windows open it can quickly become confusing which menu is for which application.

Similar to the Windows 7 task bar, icons of running programs appear on the Launcher in addition to the icons of "Pinned" applications.

"Pinned" application icons can be clicked to start that application.

Clicking on the icon of open application on the Launcher previews a small version of each window like Macintosh's Exposé..

Unfortunately the only way to select a different window of the same application with the Launcher is to use the preview feature. The classic task bar would let me select any open window with just a single click.

Unsurprisingly LibreOffice (The Oracle-free fork of OpenOffice) is inconsistent and does not conform to the new menu system.

There is a very annoying bug in the window management. When maximizing an application and then attempting to restore it, it usually ends up at some odd position partly off the screen instead of where it was originally. Sometimes it even winds up on another workspace.

Files and folder can be placed on the desktop exactly the same as the GNOME desktop, in fact the file manager is the same old Nautilus.

Launcher icons can not be placed on the desktop. Document icons can not be placed in the Launcher.

Having a "File" menu present for the desktop itself makes desktop operations a little easier as there is no need to use a right-click menu for creating new files or other common file operations. Although they still do not put any default document templates in the "Create Document" menu.

It looks like they are really trying to push their "Ubuntu One" service. By default Nautilus displays this message on all document folders.

With all of the push to save screen space, it seems like they would want to default to hiding the Nautilus side bar and tool bars, making it look more like a traditional Mac. Personally I think it fits a bit better with the Unity desktop. This has been an option for ages and fortunately still is.