Menu in panel would be more effective as menu in titlebar

I realize I'm coming late to the party, since my first experience with Unity is in the Natty beta 2 release. However, I think the design choice to put the application menu in the top panel is seriously flawed from a usability perspective. It appears to be based on an assumption that users will only want to work with one application at a time and that the application will be maximized.

Please note: I used to be a Commodore/Amiga man. I *loved* having the application menu be in the screen title. But that was also back when displays were *much* smaller. Consider a modern display @ 1920x1080. If I need to access the menu for a window in the lower right corner, I now have to move the mouse all the way to the upper left of the screen to get to the menu and then back to my window to continue working. That's a lot of mouse movement just to get to a menu option and a significant source of delay in the user's work flow. Using the [ALT] option isn't much better, since it requires moving hands between the keyboard and mouse--always a significant interruption.

These issues are even more significant and a greater hardship when there are user accessibility issues.

I respectfully suggest that it would be better to use the window's title bar as a replacement for the menu bar. This has all the benefits of the current design in terms of saving screen real estate. But it has two significant added benefits:

1) The user only needs to move the mouse a little further than previously to get to the application menu. An extra 24-30 pixels is not an extreme hardship.
2) Since the current window remains focused, it doesn't matter if the user prefers "focus follows mouse" over "click to focus". The overall implementation is simpler.

If left as is, the new Unity interface represents a major step backward for me personally. It requires significant additional mouse movement to access menus. It also forces me to do one of: a) moving the mouse in paths that avoid focusing other windows, b) switching to the keyboard to navigate the menu, or c) go back to "click to focus". Any of these options adds extra steps to every task.

Given that I've been using "focus follows mouse" for over 25 years, Unity (in its current implementation) represents a significant step backward in usability.