My ubuntu machine is pretty old so I moved over to xubuntu a while back, and I've got to say it's pretty good for me. I don't really use compiz on it, although I do on my other newer machine, on this machine I don't need the extra bells and whistles that Gnome brings with it. The only thing that held me back before was the messing about to get networked drives up and running, but now that Thunar handles it, it's xubuntu all the way! 11.04 has brought no real problems.

The one issue that I do have is my old GeForce2 mx graphics card - somewhere around 10.xx they messed up the proprietory drivers and I've not managed to get them working again - although that's also down to my laziness.

Edit:
I forgot to add, I think where they're going is trying to make it as flashy as possible with great UIs running on fast new machines, which is where they will lose the likes of me who will keep using an older hardware for as long as possible. Thankfully there are distros like xubuntu that allow us to keep updated without the bloatware.