although gutsy will have improvements on many areas which are good, there is one thing which they got wrong: pushing in compiz. Don't get me wrong compiz is great and a real improvement in everyday work, but the time is still not right.
Ubuntu is going to ship a development version of compiz 0.6 and is going to use the Xgl hack to make it run on AMD graphics cards. If they would have waited till gutsy+1, not only compiz 0.6 would have been out by then, but AMD would have released the AIGLX supporting fglrx, which would make Xgl obsolete.

I think I would have made much more sense if they concentrated on getting xserver1.4 in gutsy, since it improves EXA a lot. EXA is the new 2D acceleration architecture and by accelerating 2D drawing you get currently much more than by compositing.
While compositing basically only accelerates the window movement(and allow all the nice effects involving windows), EXA accelerates everything. Though it is not nearly as effective as compositing with compiz when it comes to window movements.
But when you resize a window - even with compiz - you will surely notice EXA since the refreshing of the window will go much more smoothly. Just as the page loading in firefox or the image editing in gimp or even playing wormux.

I just backported xserver1.4 from Debian and the difference in EXA is really noticeable using the free radeon driver.

just a guess and speculation - gutsy+1 will be a long term support release and they wanted to test ANY acceleration technology on large scale before pushing it to enterprises.

remember - just a guess

makes sense. Upgrading to xserver1.4 is surely easier than integrating compiz from scratch.

Hi,
could you possibly publish your backported xserver1.4? I'm using an ATI radeon 9250 card with OSS drivers and with compiz disabled (it works good but is a bit slow). I'd really like using EXA instead of the old and slow XAA.

Thanks!
Isidoro

thats a bit tricky, since I want to keep the trivial updates I do(gimp2.4) separate from such fundamental changes, so I cant just upload it in my PPA.

But you could just try adding the debian sid repository and installing xserver1.4 from there.