I'm usually the one rolling my eyes at the people who are reluctant to let go of the old every time an OS update comes out, but this time I'm right there with them. LaunchPad seems really redundant to me. I mean, just look at the screenshot they have of it:
How many of the icons shown on LaunchPad there are sitting a few inches below in the dock? I guess the idea is to have all the apps available in LaunchPad, but isn't that just the Apps folder?? I've been putting my Apps folder in the doc since 10.2, maybe they just need to make that more official. But I guess this could all go along with them trying to push more of a market for more and more Apps.
Anyway, all this talk of killing the Finder sounds silly to me, it doesn't sound like progress at all. It only sounds like making things more constrained and inconvenient. I'd say less than half the files I use fall nicely into the simple categories like "Music", "Photos" and "Documents". I have folders dedicated to certain aspects of what I do, and those folders will contain a mix of all sorts of different things. For example, one project I work on has its dedicated folder. That folder contains word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, pictures, presentations, poster layouts, sound files, movies, data files in .txt format... I don't want to have to access all those different files by first opening their respective apps. I think that would be a step in the opposite direction from the CoverFlow/QuickView stuff they added recently where you can access things in a folder quickly WITHOUT needing to open the dedicated App. And often i have files that I need to open with multiple different apps depending on what I'm doing. I really think the Finder needs to stick around in order to handle this kind of stuff without being completely clumsy.