Here in the real world a desktop environment like Unity is a whoe lot more than just a window manager. It includes system management and configuration GUI components, including preferences panes and utilities to control audio functions. Unity is trying to provide a comprehensive user interface to the entire OS, or as much of it as possible.
And look what an epic failure that paradigm has turned into. Much like swiss army knives have ended production of all other tools, etc.
No matter how good of a job you do going down the wrong path, fundamentally, you're still going down the wrong path.
I'm, sorry, are you suggesting that integrated GUI environemnts such as MacOSX, Windows (and I'd argue iOS and Android too), are epic failures? In contrast of course to the awesome, eternal empire of success that is the Linux desktop?
The epic fail is in some misguided areas of linux land tying the GUI background image renderer and program launcher to the sound driver such that they (supposedly) cannot be separated in practice although there is no technical reason why they shouldn't be separated. And that's considered anything other than an epic fail.
It would be like demanding if I install grub bootloader, the plain text grub config file may ONLY be edited by vi. Why not nano or emacs? Well we're trying to implement a consistent user experience by limiting user choice and ...
Its a creeping windows "all in one" design model, which is mostly awful. The opposite of the unix "do one thing really well" model.
If android did something that dumb I'd call it out, although I can't think of any example of equal fail level. Imagine if you're only allowed to edit the screen brightness (or autodetect screen brightness), if and only if, you install dogcatcher podcast player, because hey, doggcatcher is awesome, who can disagree with that. And if you remove ConnectBot app then the systemwide GPS/location system completely stops working, because, hey, why not? "I replaced my cell phone battery and that made the volume buttons stop working, because it makes logical sense to bind the two concepts together"
Here in the real world a desktop environment like Unity is a whoe lot more than just a window manager. It includes system management and configuration GUI components, including preferences panes and utilities to control audio functions. Unity is trying to provide a comprehensive user interface to the entire OS, or as much of it as possible.