Well, given the previews so far of Gnome-Shell, and having tried a few pre-release snapshots from the testing repository, I figured it's high time I got off Gnome and went to KDE. Not that theres anything wrong with it as such, just that I don't like the way it's headed.
The problem is, there's a good few Gnome apps and panel apps that I can't find any suitable equivalent in KDE without launching gnome-panel or some similar.

The majority of them are panel apps, hence the name.
I'd prefer to run some of them as they are in KDE, but from what little I can find, the differences between the two make them incompatible. If I'm wrong though, feel free to point me in the right direction.

The panel apps that I want to use, or use equivalents to are:
Gnome Globalmenu. I've only used OSX a few times, and in all honesty, I can't get along with it - but I'll give credit where it's due, the globalmenu has made things a lot easier for me.
Topshelf. I use this almost daily, just because it gives instant access to everything I'm working on. I know, I could use Folder View or the quick access plasmoid, but it's not close enough.
Dockbarx. This one isn't so much a necessity, if I can get Avant Window Navigator to launch normally in KDE, but for those times when the trunk version doesn't want to work, it's the substitute of choice.

There are only two other things that I've yet to figure out for KDE - first is how to get Dolphin (or Konqueror) to display the synchronizing/synchronized icons for the Dropbox folder, and second is that in Ubuntu Tweak, the unlock commands only seem to work when either in Gnome, or running it as root. Those aren't really necessities though, as the Dropbox icon handles the first, and sudoing the Ubuntu Tweak launcher handles the others.

Thanks if you can help.

If you mean these little applets that run inside the panel, I doubt you are going to have any luck unless there's any kind of wrapper applet for the kde plasma thingie.

Some of these apps however might not be proper applets, but regular applications that run on the system tray. In that case they should work the same under any desktop.

An option to run gnome applets without the gnome panel is to use the xfce panel. I know for good that there's a wrapper that can be used to run gnome panel applets in the xfce panel. The xfce panel should run in kde4 without problems and should be a bit lighter than the gnome panel. I don't know how the whole combo will work, though.