Sadly we're missing "something else" other than Mark Shuttleworth.

What he does, is what most others are doing in a half-hearted, compromised way: providing a "packaged" system that works without much hassle and which is based in pretty much the same interaction principles of the 70s and 80s.

Being Open Source, Linux could do a lot more than that. But nobody explores these avenues, it just aspires to be Windows/OS2/Mac in the desktop and Unix in the server. Linux could exploit the fact that it doesn't need to hide its workings, that it can allow any level of customisation in the workflow, in the windows manager, in permission management, etc etc because the user owns the software running in his or her computer. This basically has been exploited just for virtualisation.

The problem with that is monetisation. But a lot of development in the Linux community is non-for-profit anyway.

No it isn't. The number of people who don't use Linux on their desktop, simply because someone else commented on a forum that they preferred one distribution over another, is utterly negligible. In fact, the theory is just ludicrous!

I think I detect a hint of sarcasm