The UI is overly pretty for the sake of looking futuristic (my opinion) without any improvement with respect to usability.

For me, it's even more than that. It's the way that they bury important functions under ten layers of obfuscation. I think they do it to simplify the UI for beginner users. That's clearly an AOL-ism.

The number of clicks it takes me to reach any useful system setting has always gone up with each release of Windows, and in XP it went up exponentially.

Oh, and then there's this problem:

http://www.theregus.com/content/4/26272.html

Which is essentially another AOL-ism (allow remote techs too much control) gone sour.