I tend to think people put too much emphasis on the eye candy. Basically I need to be able to get to an xterm and have some way of switching virtual desktops. Beyond that it’s much ado about not too much. FWIW I miss the wobbly windows and the compiz stuff from Gnome 2.x but I’m contradicting myself a bit here so I’ll stop ....
Another comment - to make this article better they should have tried to present screen shots that were identical in every way except for the DE. Instead they change the wallpaper, the color scheme, the apps being used - so the comparison is not a very useful one.