As a Red Hat employee ...

Portability is important, but so is also coming up with clean, simple, and correct solutions. Gnome is NOT going to be able to create a top-notch desktop system while still having to take on the work of supporting a dozen or so conflicting implementations of low-level system services with dramatically different capabilities for platforms that, frankly, nobody really gives a crap about except the developers.

Hell I expect that the majority of *BSD users don't even use BSD as their primary desktop. I expect the same thing for Solaris. The reason for this is that while they are good operating systems they have always been miserable on most desktop/laptop systems. Traditionally you ALWAYS get a massive increase in utility by using OS X or Windows desktop with Solaris/BSD/Linux servers when compared to using any platform alone. So this makes all the sense the in the world and is not a flame or a indictment of any sort.. it's simply reality.

Therefore forcing the Gnome Devs to compromise to support platforms that are always going to be a hopeless basket case when it comes to desktop is not a smart thing to do.

The solution, as I see it, is this:

Fork SystemD. Make a brain-dead version of it called AbortD or something like that. Have it provide the same APIs that SystemD provides for Gnome and Gnome software and just let the functionality not supported or conflicts with 'native' utilities on non-SystemD systems just go fallow. As SystemD grows and changes it will be simple to add functionality to 'AbortD' even if that functionality provides little more then a useless 'warm fuzzy' to software that tries to hook into it.