You're right - we go through this cycle every time there's an interface redesign. Some of the specific issues will be addressed, as this is a beta release and there's still HALF A YEAR before this design is actually finished. But as for the overall design concept, everyone will get used to it.
Well, in my opinion, the change from Mac OS 9's Platinum GUI to Mac OS X's Aqua was extremely bold and dramatic, and was never before seen in the personal computer market using all those graphics, and effects like the Genie minimization, liquid filling up progress bars, etc., except for when the mouse was introduced.
Hyperboles aside, it took Apple until Mac OS X 10.4 (5 years if I remember correctly?) to get Aqua to a completely smooth working level thanks to the Intel chips and its GPU options, since the PowerPC graphic hardware wasn't there yet to cope with Quartz's demands, even for some G4 and G5 Macs. You'd get tons of choppy animations, and glitches when resizing windows. At the time, they even opted to implement just window frame resizing as a reference to the target window's size, then redraw the window's content to it (like in Mac OS 9,) since resizing windows in real time along with its content like the one we have now was extremely heavy on the GPU.
I think that right now, the GUI change is not really as dramatic, though a lot of people that wasn't there 25 years ago will get a taste of all the excitement and drama we went through, again, because no one had done something similar in the OS GUI department... of course, after that, Windows followed their lead with their Vista, Aero and stuff like that, that were just a tepid attempt at copying Aqua.
I would love to see some sort of liquid smidges here and there when you press a button or while sliding your finger on slide bars... different types of color refractions depending on the time of the day... you know, the works. Hardware power is there this time.
