My experiences have been completely opposite. Didn't GNOME 3 just silently go into fallback mode? I've been running Fedora 16 beta VM's for many weeks (on VMware and VirtualBox running on a Linux host).
It does go silently into fallback mode and it looks awful (IMHO). If I remember correctly, so does non-fallback mode though.
My problem is mostly with the fact that make and gcc are not installed on a Linux system by default, and that the software installer just hangs and offers no explanation.
Not to belabor this, but if during installation you choose "Graphical Desktop" (or are using a LiveCD) then dev tools like gcc, make etc. are not installed. (Choose "Software Development" instead and they would be.)
Sorry to hear that the installer hung though! I have not experienced that, and I'm on my 20th Fedora 16 install.
