> I'm fascinated that all the real innovation going on in desktop environments (gnome3, unity, windows 8) seems to be taking a hammering.

Envy-driven development is not a good model. Desktop environments do not need tablet features in the first place...

> This is possibly just a case of the vocal minority and normal resistance to change but it will be interesting to see it all shake out in a year or two.

Or the opposite can be true - a powerful minority (project/company leaders), envious of other companies' success on tablets, decided to spend a lot of resources to try to enter this space, to the detriment of the majority of their (desktop) users.