For my use-case (dev + web) it's superior to Windows, but it's no OSX yet. And it wouldn't take that much to make it awesome.
Example from 10 Seconds ago: Resizing the browser-window. I had to use ALT + Middle Mousebutton, because otherwise the resize-area in the corner is too small.
You know a company can work on more than one thing at the time.
To stay on topic, this demo looks pretty cool to me.
I too feel that they need to experiment and push the envelope forward. But Canonical doesn't seem to have _that_ many developers that they can focus on too many items. Of course it's run by some very experienced people, and I'm not one to complain. This seems more like a cool hack which can spawn off an independent community project which might eventually become part of the desktop.
If you look back in the last 2 Ubuntu releases you will see there has quite a bit of changes here and there, they all add up over time.
I was a solid windows user for many many years and now find myself getting frustrated using it when I have to hunt for the edge of a window. Maybe it's just me ...
Edit: November 2007: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/metacity/+bug/1603...
The cool thing about open source is that anyone can fix this bug.
That said, it's pretty annoying and I wish Canonical would devote some developer time to fixing it.
Edit: I don't get the downvote. It really is a beautiful aspect of it: if you need something fixed in a certain way, you can, you are no longer beholden to anyone.
But I'm at the time in my life right now where it's no longer fun jumping through 100 hoops to get something working at an acceptable level. I just don't have time to fix it myself. I have my own codebase and business to take care of, and I want my OS to work with minimum fuss without me having to dig into the Metacity codebase and patch things myself.
It's very true that anyone can fix it themselves, and it is indeed a beautiful aspect of Linux and OSS. But things like resizing windows should just work at this point, because I don't have the time to mess around anymore.
Clearly, things are better if stuff 'just works', but if you have a critical need that isn't being met, open source at least gives you the possibility to fix it, even if it's "expensive".
OS X is much more hackable than people usually think (although with the disappearance of input managers in snow leopard it's becoming harder)
OS X may be as hackable as Linux, but it doesn't seem as easy to find out how. It took me days to find the MacOS equivalent to xorg.conf mode lines, for example.
But are you kidding me? The Alt+MouseKey combos for moving and resizing windows around is probably one of my favorite features of their desktop interface. The moment a coworker or friend sees me do it they immediately start telling me how "awesome" it is and plead for me to "make it work" on their Windows or Mac PC.