Connect is essentially Ping 2.0 and it's not any more popular. Apple just doesn't get social networking and it's really just textbook insanity as they thought they could do the same exact thing and it would work but differently. The connect feature will probably go the way of Ping soon enough.If only there was a way to disable the Radio and Connect options along the bottom and replace them with whatever you want (for me, that would be Artists and Playlists). The rest doesn't really bother me too much.
As for the radio features, I could easily see Apple doing a separate app called Radio. I could've sworn Apple was planning on doing exactly that but obviously it didn't pan out.