Your needs are strikingly similar to mine, down to the choice of apps and launcher. What I noticed after a week of full time Gnome3 Shell use was that it was similar enough to OSX (but with the niceties of a proper window manager) that I'm finding myself hooked. Makes my ThinkPad a reasonable facsimile of my MacBook from a keyboard-nav centric, "keep out of my way" perspective. I love OSX on the MacBook, but hate it when docked. Gnome Shell gives me a reasonable OSX-like Linux experience on the laptop, but with a great docked experience to match.
Can't speak to the seamless suspend/resume support, etc on your choice of hardware, and I acknowledge that if that kind of stuff doesn't work, it'd be a dealbreaker.
Just saying, Gnome3/Shell is at least worth checking out if you like the OSX workflow and use just a few apps day to day for development.
