It doesn't appear that XMonad works as nicely, at least, I'm unable to get the panel to work. It seems gnome-panel is no longer used, furthermore, right-clicking on the new unity panel to configure it doesn't seem work. XMonad works... I'll just be panel free for a while.
I used the i3 window manager with gnome-settings-daemon and nautilus in Ubuntu 11.04. This stopped working in Ubuntu 11.10, which I blame on the upgrade from GNOME 2.x to 3.x.