There's a ridiculous option called "activities" in the upper left and when I click it I have some Mac OS X Dock wannabe and my opened Windows to the right of it (it's very annoying/angering), I have to choose applications and scroll down an ugly list of icons to find anything.

Where's the desktop icons, menu, minimized windows? why can't I add shortcuts to my task bar?

Is this how gnome is now or is there some way to make it look like a desktop environment (not a cell phone) again?

Most important,
Why is it like this? is this gnome or OpenSUSE?

This is the Gnome 3 Shell. I hate it too. You can either run it in Fallback mode (Gnome Classic) or reinstall Gnome 2. Although I'm not sure how to do so on OpenSUSE (I'm a Debian user).

If you don't like Gnome Shell then I would recommend to use XFCE, that is the desktop environment that resembles the look and feel of Gnome 2 the best, currently.

Another Luddite ...

Way of the future sport. Look at Ubuntu, Windows 8 ...
Have a look for gnome-shell-extensions - you can undo most of what irks ...