Sure they've lost some people ("I can't install compiz fusion any more") - but in the last 6 month I'm reading lots of "it's fine - first it was a big change, but now I really like it".
I like GNOME3 and would never want back to GNOME2. But everyone his own's.
The biggest irritant other than the above is that a couple of the taskbar widgets were missing. What I take away from that is that one little feature can influence us quite heavily. And it's pretty much the same story for Opera. I totally relied on the fit-to-width button and I love their spatial navigation - but have found myself using Firefox - just because I can make it more readable with a couple of easy modifications (though I still have issues with that.)
Give me a one line or paragraph summary of what Gnome 3 is, and why you'd want to use it over Gnome 2! Then try the same with Opera vs Chrome.
I think it is always hard, but sometimes open source projects have to make a cut to take a step in the right direction (and yes - some of the configuration stuff is hidden in Gnome3 and this really sucks). There are rough edges - but I think it's bold and good that they've made this step.
You can't even configure the appearance of your apps (colour scheme etc) that easily in Gnome 3, it was pretty sucky in Gnome 2. This was pretty much customisable in Windows 98!
Anyway you didn't rise my challenge of trying to summarise what Gnome 3 is! But thanks nonetheless.