Comment 26 for bug 531173

Rich: obviously you are correct. I was simply noting the exact technical nature of the issue so the developers will have a good understanding of how to fix this.

One more piece of technical information though: When using GNOME shell instead of metacity, the panel apparently uses the gnome-settings applet so under that the keyboard layout indicator always does not indicate layout, and there is no work around for that as the Ubuntu application indicator does not work under GNOME shell.