I have failed to report on my gnome-shell experiences. Well, I can sum it up pretty quickly: it was neat and promising and all that, but I ran into a rather annoying bug with alt-tab window switching where it would get confused as to what was the last window I selected. It is quite possible that this problem doesn't exist if one builds from the latest source, but I haven't had time to do that yet, so I'm back to running old fashioned Gnome again. Maybe when I upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04, I'll try it again, since the package is undoubtably newer there.