I don't understand why everyone seems to think Gnome 3 is a tablet UI. I had a touchscreen laptop for a couple of years and my experience is that it really isn't.

It's actually not bad as a keyboard-driven UI, though: it's a rare event that I'll trigger the overlay with the mouse, or even interact with it at all with the mouse beyond dragging windows into different workspaces or dragging workspaces around (the latter being the one thing I don't think you can do with the keyboard).