Shell – Good distribution for Gnome shell

Check out Grml, to quote from their page:

Grml is a bootable live system based on Debian. Grml includes a collection of GNU/Linux software especially for system administrators. Users don't have to install anything on fixed storage. Grml is especially well suited for administrative tasks like installation, deployment and system rescue.

Grml provides tools and images for installation to a USB device. It also contains an X environment and comes with elaborate default configurations for a lot of text tools (zsh, screen etc.).

There are several documented ways for customizing default Grml USB-images, depending on the use case (remastering, adding packages, starting extra services, configuring sshd keys etc.).

As an advantage to Arch Linux, Grml uses binary packages, i.e. you don't have to compile source packages all the time. Since it is a Debian based distribution, it uses the dpkg system, including the apt-get package manager, which is powerful and ultra fast.

The last time I tried it, GNOME-Shell (i.e., Metacity is important here, I suppose) was controllable with wmctrl just fine. So you can add shortcuts calling wmctrl to switch the workspace.

Be aware that it only knows about workspace 1, 2, ... -- so there might be some work involved before it behaves as you'd like it to.

(You could be better off with diving into GNOME-Shell's sources; the relevant parts here are written in Javascript and it could be fairly easy to get your keys the way you'd like them. I tried something similar with the keybindings of the window switcher Alt+Tab thingy, I'm not actually sure if the workspace switching is accessible in a similar way; still it might be worth a look.)

No idea about Unity, though.