I haven't tried 11.04/Unity yet, but my experience with previous releases has not been encouraging w.r.t. setups without any horizontal panels.
For example, with 10.10 I need to set the background to translucent (the default tiling is broken when vertical), edit the Ambiance theme to then have panel applets actually have a translucent background, replace the default window list with DockbarX, and replace the panel menu bar with just a main menu. And the clock applet calendar view is still broken, showing up above the applet.
For comparison, on Windows 7 none of that is necessary -- the panel works just as well vertically as it does horizontally.
I haven't tried 11.04/Unity yet, but my experience with previous releases has not been encouraging w.r.t. setups without any horizontal panels.
For example, with 10.10 I need to set the background to translucent (the default tiling is broken when vertical), edit the Ambiance theme to then have panel applets actually have a translucent background, replace the default window list with DockbarX, and replace the panel menu bar with just a main menu. And the clock applet calendar view is still broken, showing up above the applet.
For comparison, on Windows 7 none of that is necessary -- the panel works just as well vertically as it does horizontally.