Noteworthy as Unity’s turn away from the desktop towards the launcher might be, I’m an old dog and like my screen crowded. The (manual) way to create a new desktop shortcut icon to an application is to create a shortcut file in the Desktop directory, i.e:
/home/george/Desktop/Firefox8.desktop
And the contents:
[Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Version=1.0 Name=Firefox 8.0.1 Comment=Firefox 8 for GWT Type=Application Exec=/home/george/bin/firefox-8.0.1/firefox -P gwt Icon=/home/george/bin/firefox-8.0.1/chrome/icons/default/default48.png
George's Techblog 