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Ubuntu has been married to Gnome for a long time now. But Gnome obviously has failed to please Ubuntu. They will develop their own desktop called Unity. In fact that is not much of a loss for Gnome because Ubuntu did contribute very little to the Gnome project.
Now we know why:

Ubuntu abandoning Gnome

But I guess we can install Unity on other systems too if it is Open Source. I never am to shore of that with Canonical these days.

I personally love Gnome-shell so will stick with what I got.

Yes I guess it is fancy but very different from the present Gnome. Many people are skeptic to change. I think I will use it too when it comes out as Gnome 3

Gnome 3 & gnome shell both are in yaourt right now - have been for a bit. Just run a "yaourt gnome-shell" without the quotes, and if you have it go ahead and install, it will bring in the Gnome 3 desktop (or what Arch is calling it; I'm sure it's probably still devel).

Mandriva's Cooker also I'm thinking at 2009.1 or 2010 had gnome-shell as well - it's where I initially learned about it. Not sure if they've put it in the regular repos though.

Linux Mint I do know was at least kicking around the idea of having gnome-shell for the default desktop, but leave option for people to have regular Gnome as well. Don't know if they ever implemented that though. I think that's overkill myself for something that's just a 3D "layer" of sorts anyway, even though it is so cool - it's not stable enough yet. It would be like leaving compiz on when you logout, and having it on by default when you login to the computer - kinda crashes a few here and there. I know I tried that one time with gnome-shell, and crashed all over the place LOL. Much better just to have it, and turn it on here and there, but as a default desktop?

To be honest, I don't think this is such a smart move on Ubuntu's part, to do away with Gnome-shell. I think Gnome 3 is going to ROCK myself.

Yes The official Gnome is 2.32. Gnome 3 is next. Gnome-shell has been a kind of Gnome3 "beta" for over a year now. I have had it on Mandriva for "ages". Gnome-shell as it is called today will become Gnome3. The old Gnome versions will fade out. Gnome-shell and Gnome 3 are the same. Once Gnome3 is out there will be no more Gnome-shell unless they use it for testing yet another version. It will simply be integrated in Gnome3 as a komponent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Shell
And after that the use of Compiz is gone! I think Gnome3 will break compiz because it is not needed in KDE (Kwin). There are no platforms left for Compiz after that, unless Ubuntu's Unity can integrate it.

You're probably right there about compiz - but I myself will miss it. It does a lot that KDE's Kwin & Gnome-shell both don't do, imo. And, I'll miss my modded Emerald theme...