Just so if it wasn't obvious, I did check and no there is no .guake.desktop in my /home/shirish/
For the person asking about it the keyboard shortcuts for opening and closing the guake shell work, they do as expected, F11 which is the default and F12 for the whole window rather than the one I shared. F12 basically makes the shell whole-screen while F11 just partially, so you could fire a command or a series and the command is processed in the background while you are doing something else.
Other k/b shortcuts do differ, for e.g. in guake CTRL+T is for new tab while in KDE terminal it is CTRL+Shift+Tab. Also there are slight differences between the shells themselves. If I were in a KDE/QT session that would be cool but now when I am in mate-session.which is more or less entirely gtk+ based
That's actually the reason why I use mate over GNOME, still have the functionality without the memory bloat (arguable) but that's for another time altogether