Ultimately, Canonical intends to replace all of the menus in Unity applications with this newfangled HUD. In this new version of Unity, drop-down menus have been replaced with a search box.

Canonical made quite a splash last fall when it announced that the Unity interface used in its Ubuntu Netbook Edition would become the default interface in the Linux distribution’s desktop ...

In this new version of Unity, drop-down menus have been replaced with a search box. You simply type what you're trying to do and the application gives you the commands that align to your intent.