I wonder why the launcher and the top panel overlap in unity. The logic behind removing panels and having a dock on the left is apparently saving vertical screen real-estate. The top panel is only partially used: a few icons on the far right and one single icon on the far left. Even with the global menu enabled not all the panel space is utilized. In the attached picture you can see that this could be implemented much better. I've done this using AWN (it's not a mock-up, it's my own ubuntu remaster called AriOS
http://arioslinux.org). When you maximize a window the icons sit nicely on top of the window title bar.
The launcher also shouldn't be expanded IMHO. the reason for this is that even if you have a maximized window you can still use the free space below the launcher to right-click on the desktop or extract or drag and drop files to the desktop.
