I'll soon be returning to using a linux box as my primary machine after a year stuck on laptop-only. I'll give Ubuntu a first shot out of loyalty, but if my experience is anything like this guy's, it'll be back to Debian for me...
You can keep it – no-one’s forcing you to upgrade. Or are you saying that every open source project should keep every option and setup it’s ever had ad infinitum?
A lot can happen in a year and I'm sure someone will create a flavour of Ubuntu to you liking based on 12.04 LTS.
My response was to you bringing up the topic of security so I simply addressed that with details of Ubuntus LTS. Other than that there would be no reason to upgrade however even then you could update any software package found to have security issues on an individual basis through PPA, debs or source. That is the flexibility of opensource.
No operating system can be supported forever but funnily enough Ubuntu have just announced an extension to 5 years for 12.04 LTS.
I've been an Ubuntu user since 7.04. One of the biggest benefits was that the desktop environment stayed pretty consistent throughout the years. I always enjoyed upgrading b/c I got the benefit of bug fixes, performance improvements, and better hardware compatibility, but w/out having to re-learn a new environment. Enter Unity, and now I'm forced to either learn it, or jump to another distro.
EDIT: And yes, I know that it is harder to get a "normal" gnome interface in 11.10. That's why I haven't upgraded myself yet. But I will, and I'll see what others have done to get around Unity. I just can't see it as the "end" of Ubuntu. Maybe some of us power users will go back to Debian, or to Xubuntu, etc. Maybe we'll lead an exodus to a new distro, but I think more likely Ubuntu will stay at the leading edge of the "user-friendly" Linux distributions for a while.