Um...have I walked into the Twilight Zone here? "There is nothing new under the sun." With nearly ANY window manager (Gnome, KDE, XFce, etc etc etc) and Compiz, this has been done already - time and time again. Unfortunately, no one has completely incorporated all of this "pre-configured" in a "first install" basis. This is just a melting pot of already existing feature.
I truly do send kudos to Ubuntu/Canonical for this concerted and unified effort - however I do have to remain cool about it all as I've been doing it since the advent of Compiz, so there is really nothing special here.
On this note, though, I have to state that this is one of the draws towards GNU/linux that I've been able to use for my clients in migrating them away from Microsoft-based environments, or from "dogmatic dependence" - especially those powerusers that CAN make use of multiple desktops and window enhancements.