[pepr]

Gnome 3 is far from dead compared to Zune HD (officially killed) or Google Wave (ditto). (Not sure about WebOS, I remember reading it was sold off.)

The primary reason you don't see it around is that Ubuntu has such a large market share of the desktop Linux and chose Unity as the default. And few people bother (or know about the possibility for that matter) to change from the default even though it's trivial (apt-get install ubuntu-gnome-desktop). But remember that Gnome 2 used to be the default and quite popular (i.e. everyone had it because everyone had Ubuntu).

Now of course, I'm biased - I got pissed off with Unity, tried bunch of various desktop environments and settled on Gnome 3 and I really like it. The dynamic creation & removal of desktops feels strange at first but is so convenient after a while that I miss it everywhere else.