How does Unity make your life hard? I'm on osx myself but I love the unity interface and everyone that I've seen using it seems to easily find their way.
Change in general is bad for non-power users short term. Especially now that the interfaces grew less similar to the old windows paradigm it will get harder to steal the theoretical people escaping the Metro UI.
I have personally not formed any opinion if Unity and Gnome Shell are good or not. I have used them too little to say, I primarily use XFCE myself which was very easy to get started with.
