I don't think that that's the case at all. Even if we ignore the obvious differences in philosophy and implementation between the two, we're better off that th

I don't think that that's the case at all. Even if we ignore the obvious differences in philosophy and implementation between the two, we're better off that they both exist solely because they've acted as hedges for one another. When KDE 4 was released, it wasn't exactly ready for widespread use. While things did rapidly improve, GNOME at least provided an option for those who wanted a more modern desktop environment than KDE 3.5 in the interim. The opposite situation has happened more recently. GNOME 3 was a complete disaster at first, and in many ways still is. Many former GNOME 2 users switched to KDE 4, by that time a mature and very usable desktop environment. Since we have seen only minimal effort from the GNOME 3 community to address its severe problems, the existence of KDE has become more critical for more users.