On the topic of Windows 95 UI clones... If you go one minor version back from your experience, RedHat 5.0 actually shipped with FVWM95* as its default desktop and it was fugly:

http://toastytech.com/guis/x.html

* FVWM, with an unholy patchset to drag it kicking and screaming into kinda-sorta resembling Windows 95