GNOME 2.25.90 has been released, which is the sixth development release leading up to GNOME 2.26 and is the first beta. The release of GNOME 2.26.0 will come in March, but until then will still be a few more development releases although the API/ABI freezes are in effect...
I have liked Nautilus a lot, it is simple an nice, but it had no tabs until one release or something like that.
Now I use Dolphin, it was inspired on Nautilus, but has many more interesting things, like a integrated Konsole, the ability to move the panels to any position, etc.
In general KDE is much more integrated than any other DE, also with the use of KPart.