I've been running the beta on my phone for a while ago, and I pretty much forgot about it. The new design works really well and is much less obtrusive than you'd imagine. Those few bad moments posted from the first dev beta have all been resolved now.

It still has plenty of consistency errors and issues for the devs. But even if they fix all the bugs, I still think the UI changes are regressive: now things are buried in even more icons; the menus warp, change color, and move in distracting ways; and text on button and menus have never been harder to read.

Most people aren't very discerning about user interface intricacies.

Most people's reaction to the iOS 7 design disaster was: "ooh this feels like a whole new phone".

So there's that.