I realize it's not part of the default distribution, but installing xubuntu-desktop is a nearly-painless way to ditch Unity for XFCE. I've been very happy with it.
You can install Cinnamon (the window manager used by Linux Mint), and it's very good. It behaves "traditionally" (i.e. like Windows 7), and it's much prettier than XFCE.
I recently switched to Cinnamon and couldn't be happier.
I never really liked Unity, i used Gnome Shell and it was usable ok. But for my work nothing seems to beat the good old taskbar-based design.
