Applications will not show up in Gnome Shell, however they show up on the "Favourites" bar, and can be searched for.
For example, if I search for something spelled incorrectly ("chrmium"), it shows nothing, however, if I search for something correctly ("chromium"), it displays the "Applications" header. This means that it is properly searching for applications, but just not displaying them.
I am running OpenSUSE 12.1 x64 in a Virtual Box VM.