What? Absolutely not!
I'm talking about how Canonical was the first (in my experience and use of Linux with the Gnome desktop) to break away from the earlier Gnome 1.x paradigm. Redhat and Fedora were using a large panel on the bottom of the screen with their Blue Curve themes. Canonical was the first Gnome distro that I remember to start using two panels, one on the bottom for a taskbar and another for the top of the screen with the application launcher and system tray.
That's how the 2.x branch of the Gnome desktop looked prior to Canonical. Then with Ubuntu 4.10 came the desktop we all remember and love today:
That's what I'm talking about. The move away from the fat taskbar on the bottom, which was very much a KDE thing for a long time.
When I say that Martin Wimpress picked up that legacy, I'm referring mostly to the papercuts that the Ubuntu version of Gnome 2.x benefited from greatly, not Gnome 2.x itself or even Mate Desktop. I'm talking about the way this already polished desktop was retained when Mate desktop became the Ubuntu-Mate desktop, if you understand my meaning?