I cannot believe they removed the option to run classic. I literally cancelled my update the moment I learned that (on slashdot). I hear there is a way to bring it back but I am worried about compatibility at this point. So I will have to wait a bit and see whether others can get classic to work for ubuntu 11.10 and look for alternative distros.
This is really annoying because the main reason I run ubuntu is so I do not have to deal with testing and installing distros.
Install the GNOME 3 packages using apt (gnome-shell and gnome-panel should get you most of what you need) and run them in fallback mode. The GNOME 3 fallback mode is pretty close to the GNOME 2 experience, although it is missing a couple of features that some people may want (e.g., panel applets). I've been using Oneiric this way for months and I'm pretty happy with it.
Unfortunately for me I'd been running Xmonad as my Gnome window manager. I can't figure out how to keep doing that at the moment, so I'm sticking with 11.4 for a while at least.
The one thing, and this might have changed, that really annoys me with Gnome, is that the network manager panel applet, doesn't seem to have an equivalent in the menu system. That's the thing that lists your wireless networks etc.
Although I don't use the menu's that often, and I hate digging down into menus - I find they are really useful for reminding myself quickly which programs I have installed. I only really noticed this when I tried out Unity. I had no feeling of what was installed or what was not. For example I went to install transmission - and then found it was already there after I had dug through to the software center. That feels really wrong.
This is really annoying because the main reason I run ubuntu is so I do not have to deal with testing and installing distros.