Kernel k-means and spectral clustering have both been used to identify clusters that are non-linearly separable in input space.
A major drawback to k-means is that it cannot separate clusters that are non-linearly separable in input space.
Clustering has received a significant amount of attention in the last few years as one of the fundamental problems in data mining. k-means is one of the most popular clustering algorithms.
References
Introduction to Support Vector Machines: And Other Kernel-Based Learning Methods.
Iterative clustering of high dimensional text data augmented by local search.
On clusterings – good, bad, and spectral.
On spectral clustering: Analysis and an algorithm.