Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop (ComputerWorld)

no distro (including Ubuntu) is required to ship any software.

if they don't want to ship KDE then they should say so, and that will be the end of it.

but claiming that they can't ship it because the upstream developers won't commit to
supporting it for three years is not being honest because very few (if any) of the other
upstream developers will commit to supporting their software for the same time.

so if 3 years of upstream support is a requirement for a package to be installed most other
packages should be ripped out. if it isn't then KDE should be included (or the real reason for
it not being included should be stated)

personally I don't use either KDE or Gnome, they both eat up to much of the system to suit me,
so it's not as if I am personally impacted by the decision in either direction. However, I am
calling BS on the stated reason for not including KDE.