GNOME 3 has been released:

• release announcement
• some more stuff from GNOME (unfortunately not a permalink; it’s the April 2011 edition from the archives)
• nice review from Ars Technica.

GNOME 3 appears to me to be a very positive step forward. Workspaces, taskbars etc. don’t make sense to newcomers, and the Gnome Shell way of doing things looks a lot more intuitive to me. I admit I haven’t actually used GNOME 3 and won’t be doing so since I have a highly-tuned environment in place already, so perhaps my opinion isn’t worth much, but I will be introducing GNOME Shell to newbies and not-so-newbies alike with a great deal of enthusiasm.

There’s stupid graphical swishing though, which is going to stop this from being as portable as it should be — see the Ars article for a summary of the issues.