The wallpapers they put in are incredibly deep and emotional, and that is what the new Apple is going for. They're marketing towards people's emotions. You look at all the older wallpapers, they all looked very cool (the OSX walls) or very iconic.
However, that's not what sells things. You look at the iPhone Facetime commercials, the iPad. There is some serious emotions going on, and I felt incredibly fascinated with what facetime can allow us to do just because of those commercials.
It's a marketing ploy, and it's an incredibly hard to do marketing ploy. Marketing to emotions such as empathy, sympathy, catharsis and others, how do you do that?
The new wallpapers have a lot of emotion in them. Every wallpaper screams humanistic approach with a ton of emotions. The soft colors and the peacefulness of each wallpaper show that's where Apple is headed. Even the Lion has an incredibly emotional effect on people.
So please, try to understand what the designers behind Apple are trying to do, instead of going "I don't like this or that". There are some incredibly smart and tip of the industry people making these decisions.
We are at a point in society where computing is no longer left to the nerds and the geeks. To the rest of the world, emotions sell things. Hand bags worth $2000 are sold by the kind of emotions that originates from people who use them. Sports cars are bought with passion, not with reason. Apple, being the high end computer dealership, needs passion and emotion to be their forefront of sales, similar to Lamborgini or Ferrari. Computer hardware is at a point where there seriously isn't any difference between different computers (or a big enough difference for people to realistically care that much)
What sells is the design, the implementation, and the kind of humanistic things that can be drawn out of a product.
This is why other tablets fail, they aim for the geek market with hardware specs.
