This is not innovation; it is an improvement. If you want innovation, look at Gnome-do, rhythmbox, gimp, and any upstream project. The purpose of elementary is simply to improve usability and add small usability-related features.
I should say though, I think people put far, far too much weight on "innovation" and "originality" (not mentioned here but along the same lines).
That said, it was more important for me that it was a tiling window manager, not that it was XMonad (it's simply the one I use). Dwm would probably work just as well.