KDE is slowly losing ground. It used to be my desktop of choice but that was in the knoppix days. Now there is of course Kubuntu but I switched (more or less by accident rather than by design) a while ago and I don't think I'll be switching back. My desktop is practically invisible to me anyway, all I run on a normal workday is firefox, a terminal window and thunderbird.
The one piece of software from the KDE distro that I really love is Konsole.
Guake in GNOME3 was pretty broken the last time I used it (a lot of time ago, it was the thing that made me switch to a tiling WM).
Something changed lately?
I don't use KDE anymore (switched to XMonad a few years ago), but I still use Dolphin for its DAV/SMB capabilities, and occasionally gwenview. But why do you think KDE is "losing ground"?
And Konsole is pretty good, but doesn't handle resizing well in XMonad, so it's urxvt for me.
The one piece of software from the KDE distro that I really love is Konsole.