GNOME is deliberately dumbed down. KDE has all of the bells and whistles and
everything is configurable. I use both. GNOME on my netbook and KDE on my
desktop computer.

GNOME 3 will have plasmas (they are not called that, but essentially are)
like KDE but aside from that it will be quite different. It will look more
like UNE than the current GNOME with big icons that will give you options
when you hover over them. The main parts are the GNOME Shell and Zeitgeist.

Personally I don't think that the average GNOME suer will be impressed. It
is too radical for them. KDE users went over this when 3.5 was replaced with
4.0 and many users elected to run 3.5 or even switch to GNOME. GNOME users
are worse than KDE users when it comes to change, so I expect lots of
resistance.

See:
www.workswithu.com/.../