In all seriousness, Unity was a thing from Canonical long before anyone knew the direction Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell was heading. Canonical wanted their own desk

In all seriousness, Unity was a thing from Canonical long before anyone knew the direction Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell was heading. Canonical wanted their own desktop experience that they could drive in the direction they wanted to go, and they would have never gotten that from Gnome or KDE or any other existing project. The fact that they're switching Unity from a Gtk to a Qt backend in order to support their mobile efforts and their desire to have a single UX everywhere is just further proof of this strategy.