The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

1) Good. More free space as a default and fewer panels is better.

2) Who's requesting 90-degree rotated text? I'm hearing requests to make the top-panel moveable to the left or right side of the screen.

3) This is a straw-man argument. Plenty of netbooks are available w/ a 1366x768 resolution or at least 1024x600 resolution. The former is equal to most of those 'equal cost laptops' you mention.

This mindset is also ignoring a basic physical fact:

LCD screens are becoming wider and shorter, to the point even $3k+ laptops aren't physically available except with 16:9 or in increasingly rare cases 16:10 screens.

I'd rather work in an 800x600 box than a 1024x560 box. Maximizing the smallest available dimension seems a more sane idea to me, even if it costs more overall pixel count.