Yes, but none of that was a surprise (we knew about Unity, Gnome and KDE 4 long before any of that hit the distros), we could influence the decisions (arguing in favor of other directions) and, if enough people disagree with the the leaders, they can always make a viable fork.
You can't force an open-source developer to work on something he/she doesn't like and agree.
Well, Microsoft may not have explained everything at once (Who does?) but that doesn't explicitly mean they forced people to overreact.