GNOME and its applications have been headed in that direction for a while now, but I'm not sure Canonical are behind those changes. If they were, I'm sure they would have done something about GNOME apps looking alien on Xubuntu, for example.
As that link suggests, the Mint team are looking to produce apps that run on any desktop environment, forking GNOME apps that don't comply with that. Hopefully that keeps the momentum going for that sort of thing.