Any Linux distro with its own UI spent more time on elegant, usable, and consistent design than Elementary did.
The multiple desktops is on the bottom and not part of exposé. It includes a new desktop button. It has a dark background rather than blending in with the desktop. It appears you can drag app icons from one desktop to another-- I've never seen that feature before.
The header is black/dark grey, not silver. The colors, gradients and layout of their music player and iTunes look significantly different when compared side by side.
The file manager is greyscale: it doesn't appear to use blue tones like Finder, except for folder icons.
Windows in OS X have 4 buttons, all different colors. Windows in Elementary have 2 buttons, styled the same.
This may seem like a pedantic critique of your comment, but my point is that it's clearly not a "carbon copy" of OS X. The statement "none of the effort was done for design" is not a fair criticism of the Elementary development team.