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If I'm not mistaken, the Dashboard wasn't as prevalent in KDE releases before this comment was made. Even still, I generally don't use it. I think there are certain cases, though, in which it'd be handy to have things such as system notifiers on top, but less useful items like games on bottom.

As for activities, I simply think it would be a more intuitive system to be able to "slide" activity layers over, giving it a visual sense of what's actually going on when you use an Activity. In a graphical sense, it can be related much to a filter or a mask layer when you change activities. And the current switcher just does not seem to imply that as much as it just changing your background and widgets.

For the most part, it does not change anything you are used to. Ctrl+F12 could just as easily bring the bottom layer up. And you could have snow on top of windows, and extended abilities to have certain widgets on top of windows. In the end, there is little it actually gains, except for the fact that everything that is present on the desktop is easily manageable, not thrown all over the system menus. I only came up with idea when I realized that the ability to have snow on the desktop was in an effects menu that generally applies to windows, but is named "Desktop Effects," that is in a completely different menu altogether from the general "Background Image" menu. The desktop, windows, widgets, effects, and activities are already layers as to how they are presented; this idea simply makes the menus that control their behavior reflect that.