I'm sure they lost a lot of fans with Unity. They lost even more with the Amazon search debacle. But it's almost certain that they won just as many with both of those changes. I don't really like or dislike Unity. I've used it in the past and been happy enough. Ubuntu did lose a lot of my trust with the Amazon search feature though. My grandmother used to say "trust is hard won, and easily lost".
If I am at all representative for early Ubuntu users they themselves might also have lost quite a few enthusiastic fans in the process.
From what I read here they won quite a few enthusiastic users as well so it's not all black and white though.