@Nathan: No. Definitely not. 

The main and major mistake of unity, which your proposal does not solve, is to force the user into a particular desktop and working style without leaving any options, without allowing to configure to your local needs and taste. Unfortunately, this enforced style does not meet most people's requirements. The odd thing is that unity tries to be a poor man's MacOS, which is really a bad idea. Whoever wants to use a Mac will buy a Mac, and not use a lame copy. 

E.g. I've installed a new machine this week with oneiric and again tried to work with unity. Unity is broken through bad design and poor ergonomics. E.g. that MacOS-like style to move all Menus from the program's window to the top bar is usefull in full screen mode, but otherwise highly annoying and confusing, because it moves menues far away from the active program. Even worse, that ugly window style makes it difficult to see which window is currently active. Plenty of times I accidently used the menues of the wrong program (i.e. other program than intended). And it makes usage slow and counter-intuitive, because menues are too far away. (And this is not necessarily good just because Apple does it that way.)

In other words: The Annoyance of unity is not just limited to that launcher bar stealing mouse events. It's the whole idea that's odd. The idea of forcing people to use a user interface build after the personal flavour of some ubuntu designers, but loaded with flaws. You need to make it configurable. Make every single design element of unity (i.e. every detail where it differs from earlier ubuntu desktops that were really good) configurable. Allow users to turn it off if they don't like it. 

This means: A poor launcher bar does not get any better if you move it to a different position or give it a different shape or timing. You need to provide users an option to work completely without that damned launcher bar at all. Because some like it, but others hate it. This thing is really bad designed and a major reason for not using unity. On one computer I'm using Gnome3, on the other XFCE, just because unity is a continuous annoyance, confusing, overloaded with automatisms and animations, and in my eyes designed for children, not for working people. Even after several months of trying to do so I cannot really work with unity. It's a horrible interface. 

When installing a new net top computer this week, I used an old 2,5 inch hard disk which I had replaced in a notebook computer about 3 years ago and never touched it again since then. I found an old ubuntu on it, which still booted into it's regular desktop. This old gnome2 desktop was wonderful. Fast, intuitive, no problems at all. Doing it's job and not disturbing the user. (And nice brown colors compared to that ugly ones of today.) I hate to say, but ubuntu's desktop has significantly degraded and become worse since that. 2-3 years ago i was working with the desktop. Today I have to work against the desktop. 

Linus Thorvalds described it absolutely correctly: Gnome2 was much better then XFCE is. But XFCE is still better than Unity and Gnome3 are today. 



@Pako: Not correct. I also own an iPad, an iPod and an Android phone. Don't ever compare that with a desktop machine. Don't expect oranges to have the same skin as apples.