Dock on the left, title bar and sys tray at the top, window controls on the left side... this vaguely reminds me of some other OS, and I don't think that's at all a bad thing. People like OS X's UI. It makes sense to go with what works.
If they wanted to save more vertical screen real estate, Ubuntu could take another hint from Apple and enable Global Menu Bar by default ( http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/ )
They are doing this. "Third, we will make the top panel smarter. We’ve already talked about adopting a single global menu, which would be rendered by the panel in this case."
My OS X dock was always on the left, but the default positon was at the bottom. Later design changes actually re-inforced this decision as I believe the 3-D effect didn't work vertically.
If they wanted to save more vertical screen real estate, Ubuntu could take another hint from Apple and enable Global Menu Bar by default ( http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/ )