The bar at the left of the desktop on Unity is very much like the Windows 7 taskbar, which can optionally be placed at the left. This doesn't seem credible to me.
I covered the differences in my 2013 (ish) article which I linked at the end of my blogpost. I don't think you've read it, from what you're saying. I suggest that you do.
Win7 revamped the taskbar specifically to make it look more like a dock, but it wasn't like that before (which I suspect you haven't used) and there are salient differences between docks and taskbars.
