As far as I know, normal shelving just simply share your "pending changes", i.e. your team members can unshelve what you shelve and continue working on that version. When other team members perform a "Get latest..." they don't get your changes that you have shelved.
Hope this was not too unclear.
- Loc
This sounds like high friction though. Do people really have this problem often enough they need to institute command & control castle walls to keep developers from hurting themselves? I haven't had this problem very often, but I haven't been on a team of more than 3-4 devs at a time.
It sounds like this is the wrong way to approach the problem and that you should be instilling the practices and rhythms and habits rather than pulling up the gate
Chad, you are correct that in a perfect world developers would follow best practices and standards and all code produced would work great without failures, but unfortunately in larger development teams a developer checking in code "because it works fine on my machine" which does not compile, the effect on the team as a whole can be devastating.
Friction can be a lot higher when a single user holds up the entire development effort because of their carelessness, and the gated checkin solution can alleviate this by allowing users to shelve their changes for committal and then getting on with other work while the changes are tested and checked in, without affecting other system users.
OpenGauntlet is overkill for development teams of 10 or fewer, but in larger CMMI based teams it can greatly improve the development output.