The takeaway

My wife is a fairly typical user and she got updated to Oneiric last night. Unity and gnome 3 got a (very shouty!) thumbs down. Like most users she wants her interface to just stay the same as it was before - not even change the colours, never mind how it all works. And not icons for everything, nor annoying slidy bars so things move around. It's all hateful, and, as you say, obviously optimised for tablets/netbooks/phones which is not what you want on a desktop/laptop.

The obvious escape direction is Debian, which isn't afflicted in the same way by 'UI designers'. Sadly that doesn't solve the 'gnome has gone all annoying too' problem, for which xfce seems to be the easiest way back to something reasonably familiar.

This is probably a pretty common reaction. But it's interesting to see non-geeks feeling pretty much the same about their UI as us geeks do when presented with all that annoying shiny stuff we didn't ask for. Apparently there are people who like it, I just don't seem to have met very many of them.