I agree with you about the new look of iCal and Address Book... I find it to be gaudy and as soon as there is a hack to get the SL look back, I'm going to change it.
I can't say I mind the animations, though. In fact I like those.
However, about Outlook... I despised Outlook both in the way it is a labyrinth of unintuitive settings and sluggishness. Many people at work joke about launching Outlook, then going for coffee while it loads whereas OS X Mail and Thunderbird load the same mail Outlook chokes on from the same MS Exchange servers very quickly. I much prefer the way OS X Mail is now (separate apps which share underlying data).
If you like Outlook better, though, you might want to check out Entourage.