Sorry to dig up a (slightly) old thread but this may be of interest:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.release-team/1526Apparently GNOME will be maintaining a number of extensions that will emulate the traditional GNOME 2 interface, in GNOME 3 Shell. That way they don't have to maintain separate codebases (which means less bugs).
That seems like a sensible solution, as long as GNOME 3 Shell works fine for users without 3D acceleration.
