An interesting article on exploring future GNOME ideas over at footnotes. In the comments is also another page with some interesting / radical ideas for design of menus, window management ideas, filemanagement, and others. Make sure you check the bottom of the pages for more links to other interesting stuff. Anyway, they all have some interesting ideas, especially if combined with some of the hardware graphics ideas that are out there for gnome 2.12.
Hopefully some of these will be implemented, and not lost or politiced away.