Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't want to defend Gnome because I also can't stand it over KDE most of the time, but I think GNOME is built for one actually useful thing... laptops. Gnome feels good on a computer with a single small display.
I'm probably the last person who still uses Unity and it's for this exact reason. I set the launch bar to auto hide and use the compiz Expose clone hot corners to switch windows. It all just gets out of the way. I don't know why Gnome didn't adopt the Unity menu bar integration, instead you get to waste space on the taskbar on the bottom AND that useless status bar on the top.
1. You can set the launcher/taskbar/panel to auto-hide. 2. You can set up the screen corners (or a keyboard shortcut) to show an Exposé-style view of all running applications/windows. 3. You can have a global menu bar.