Not really. Pantheon, elementary's desktop environment, is forked from gnome. So in that sense, it's very much a traditional linux desktop distro (not to belittle it, as they have put in a lot of worthwhile work into pantheon & the assorted apps)
Ah, I thought it was it's own thing. Oh well. I do think we're due for a commercial desktop Linux distro. Yes I think it should be paid. Something needs to take the place of Windows that isn't tied to specific hardware (MacOS) because Windows is getting unusable.