I'm a KDE user and quite excited about KDE 4, but I think the progress of Gnome is very promising, too.
Gnome and KDE both innovate, and both push limits, and both will learn from each other.
KDE learns from Gnome and uses the Telepathy definition.
Gnome learns from KDE and switches to WebKit which originates from khtml.
Both work together under the hood of freedesktop.org
And both are moving ever faster to replace proprietary systems.