One of the things I like about Unity on the desktop is how keyboard-oriented it is. Features like the Dash and the HUD are specifically aimed at exposing functionality without requiring you to take your hands off the keyboard in order to push a mouse around. Which is appealing, at least to me. But whatever it is, it definitely is not tablet-oriented.
It's true that Canonical's vision for Unity is that it will eventually scale up and down beyond desktop/laptop displays, but they have absolutely not taken the Windows 8 approach of starting with a touch UI and then jamming it onto machines where it doesn't fit. Instead they've come up with a core set of metaphors (the Dash, scopes, etc.) and then looked for ways to present them appropriately on different platforms, which seems much more sensible.