Yeah, I understand and I don't have an iOS 7 device to compare on (and don't have an iPad, period), but this is the behavior I always remember from iOS 7 - I remember it drove me crazy and I had to retrain myself to wait for the animation to finish before I could tap an app. I'd be interested to see two (two phones or two iPads) running iOS 7 and 8 side by side demonstrating different behavior in this regard
Maybe Reduce Motion might help in this case? It is possible what you guys are seeing differently could be caused by one of the settings being different.