Apple is clearly using this discussion page revamp to lay the foundations for a Facebook competitor. For once, you only get a lot of their features if you view the discussions page via your 'personalised view'. And although you can still simply use the default version of your 'personalised view', most people won't like it as it does not give you access to your previous posts without modifying the layout (or jump out of your personalised view into the non-personalised version which is nevertheless confusingly called 'Your Stuff').
Ah, doubtful. Starbucks rolled out a customer site (mystarbucksidea.com) several years back, and it's laid out this exact same way. Actually, I was working for Starbucks at the time and we were partnered with Apple who was interested in the site. What Apple did is nothing new, and forums have been transistioning to this for the past few years. (Sorry Macrumors, love you, but you're forum is a bit dated as well.)
The voting functions weren't active the other day, but the new Apple forums will also tie in Yahoo! Answers type functions. I like this idea. Before, you had some idea (kind of like on here) that a person was a veteran poster, but they weren't rated for what they posted. Every time someone gets voted a good answer, 5 points, best answer 10. (almost like Ebay feedback.) Will really help when someone is suggesting you go into terminal and enter a bunch of commands and you're unsure if they know what they're talking about. For instance, on mystarbucksidea.com, customers give feedback or suggestions for the company to implement. Then people vote them up. Suggestions with high rankings get seen more. On a tech site, if Apple does this right, it should take a problem... say a new iMac hardware issue, and quickly flag it and bring it to the top of the rankings. The support forums are monitored, but not well, nor ranked in anyway.
It's not about social networking as much as it is making a support site more socially interactive. Most of the time people encounter a problem, it's not apple's help pages that solve it, it's other users on the forums. I liked it.
PS. After Ping, if Apple ever attempts social networking of any kind they need smacked. I wish the support site had a suggestion area, because I'd post for renaming Ping Dung.