But what exactly does Apple do that disrupts the scene? It's their scene to disrupt, I don't really have the same problem with that. Ubuntu is just one distro, they don't own Gnome. Now developers are forced to pick sides. Maybe that's the main point I should have made.
Maybe I'm biased on this - but Linux has done nothing on the UI front for years. Even discounting gigantic embarrassments of programmer-UI like the Gimp, both Gnome and KDE have really, really bad UI. There's no consistency, nor intelligent design except perhaps "Windows is doing it, so it must be right".
Let's be honest, desktop Linux UI right now is really just a (bad) clone of Windows 2000.
So Gnome isn't going to fix their UI on their own - but yet that's what your users are interacting with every single day. I for one am glad that Ubuntu is fixing what the Gnome team has demonstrated for years that they cannot/will not.
Here's the way I see it: either we continue to sit and hope in vain that Gnome will step up and do something great with their UI... or somebody else takes charge at the cost of fracturing the community. For the sake of desktop Linux, I choose the latter.
